II 


THE  GERMANIC  ORIGIN 


NEW  ENGLAND  TOWNS 


'"Si  Ton  vcut  lire  radniiriiblc  ouvrage  de  Tacite  sur  les  moeurs  des  Germains,  on 
Terra  «|ue  c'est  d'eux  que  les  Anglois  ont  tire  I'idee  de  leur  gouvernement  politique. 
Ce  Iwau  systj^me  a  Cte  trouvfi  dans  les  bois." — Montesquieu. 

"I»iis  Siudiuni  des  Genieindewcsens  in  Anierika,  dem  Sie  sich  jetzt  widmen,  wird 
sirher  suhr  fruchtltar  werden.  In  dor  Geiuciiide  ist  die  grosse  Mehre  der  Burger  mehr 
ab  im  Stale  veranlasst,  an  offentliclien  Augeiegeiiheiten  und  gemeinsaraen  Interessen 
lu  botheiligen.  Die  Gemeinde  ist  iiberdem  audi  die  Vorschule  fur  den  Stat.  Der  Bau 
der  Repiibliken  hat  seine  tJrundlage  in  der  Selbstandigkeit  der  Gemeinden."— ^/uw/^c/i^j. 

".Ml  New  England  is  an  aggregate  of  organized  democracies.  He  that  will  under- 
stand the  |Hiliiical  cliaracter  of  New  England  must  study  the  constitution  of  its  towns, 
iu  school!!,  and  its  militia."— £a»ero/if. 

"If  you  wish  to  sec  Old  England,  you  must  go  to  New  England."— i^i-eeman. 


JOHNS  HOPKINS  UNIVERSITY  STUDIES 

1  N 

Historical   and   Political    Science 

HERBERT  B.  ADAMS,  Editor 


History  is  past  Politics  and  Polities  present  History.— FreemoM 


II 

THE  GERMANIC  ORIGIN 

or 

NEW  ENGLAND  TOWNS 

Read  before  the  Harvard  Historical  Society,  May  9, 1881 

By  HERBERT  B.  ADAMS,  Ph.  D. 

Witli    Notes    oil    Cooperation    in    University    Worlz 


Published  by  the  Johns  Hopkins  University 
BALTIMORE 

1882 


JOHN  MURPHY  &  CO.,  PRINTERS, 
BALTIMOKE. 


THE    GERMANIC    ORIGIN 

0  F 

NEW  ENGLAND   TOWNS. 


The  reproduction  of  the  town  and  parish  systems  of  Old 
England  under  colonial  conditions  in  America  is  one  of  the 
most  curious  and  suggestive  phenomena  of  American  history. 
The  process  was  so  quiet,  so  unobtrusive,  so  gradual,  so  like 
the  growth  of  vegetation  in  spring  time — in  short,  so  natural, 
that  it  seems  to  have  escaped  the  notice  of  many  historians  of 
the  larger  colonial  life.  They  have  dealt  with  questions  of 
church  and  state,  with  patents  and  charters,  Pilgrims  and 
Puritans,  Baptists,  Quakers,  wars,  witches,  colonial  unions 
and  struggles  for  national  independence,  but  the  origin  and 
growth  of  that  smaller  communal  life  within  the  colonies  has 
been  somewhat  neglected.  And  yet  these  little  communes  < 
were  the  germs  of  our  state  and  national  life.  They  gave  the 
colonies  all  the  strength  which  they  ever  enjoyed.  It  was  the 
towns,  parishes  and  counties  that  furnished  life-blood  for 
church  and  state,  for  school  and  college,  for  war  and  peace. 
In  New  England  especially,  towns  were  the  primordial  cells 
of  the  body  politic.  In  all  the  colonies,  civic  communities  , 
were  the  organic  tissues,  without  which  the  colonial  body 
would  have  been  but  a  lifeless  mass. 

At  the  opening  meeting  of  the  American  Association  for 
the  Advancement  of  Science,  which  met  in  Boston  August  26, 
1880,  Mr.  Lewis  H.  Morgan,  in  his  inaugural  address,  paid 
the  following  tribute  to  the  towns  of  New  England  :  "  Your 
Excellency,  Governor  of  the  Commonwealth  of  Massachusetts, 

5 


6  The  Germanic  Origin  of 

without  intonding  to  depart  from  the  proprieties  of  the  occa- 
sion, it  muv  be  proper  to  say  that  those  of  us  who  come  from 
beyond  the  Hudson  can  but  feel  that  in  entering  New 
Eno'hind  we  reach  the  birthplace  of  American  institutions. 
To  some  of  us  it  is  the  land  of  our  fathers,  and  we  cannot 
approach  the  precincts  of  their  departed  presence  without  the 
sentiment  of  filial  veneration.  Here  they  laid  broad  and 
doej)  the  foundations  of  Americau  freedom,  without  which 
American  science  would  have  been  an  infant  in  leading-strings 
to-dav.  Here  was  developed  the  township,  with  its  local  self- 
government,  the  basis  and  central  element  of  our  political 
system.  Upon  the  township  was  formed  the  county,  composed 
of  several  towns  similarly  organized ;  the  State  composed  of 
several  counties,  and,  finally,  the  United  States,  composed  of 
several  states;  each  organization  a  body  politic,  with  definite 
governing  powers  in  a  subordinate  series.  But  tiie  greatest 
of  all,  in  intrinsic  importance,  was  the  township,  because  it 
was  and  is  the  unit  of  organization,  and  embodies  the  great 
jirincijile  of  local  self-government.  It  is  at  once  the  greatest 
and  the  most  important  of  American  institutions,  because  it 
determines  the  character  of  the  State  and  National  Govern- 
ment. It  is  also  historically  significant  because  it  shows  that 
American  Democracy  may  justly  claim  to  be  the  daughter  of 
that  Athenian  Democracy  which  generated  and  produced  the 
most  signal  outburst  of  genius  and  intellect  in  the  entire 
history  of  the  human  race.  Nor  is  this  presage  of  the  future 
without  its  own  significance.  What  was  achieved  for  philos- 
<>l)hy  and  art  under  the  free  institutions  of  Athens  may  yet  be 
achieved  for  science  in  the  evolution  of  the  same  forces  in 
America."* 

Mr.  Morgan's  recognition  of  the  historic  significance  of 
New  England  towns,  in  their  relation  to  science  and  national 
growth,  addressed  as  this  recognition  was  to  the  chief  magis- 
trate of  Massachusetts,  recalled  to  mind  the  words  of  Gov- 


•Report  in  Boston  Journal,  August  26,  1880. 


New  England  Towns.  7 

ernor  Long  himself  in  an  oration  delivered  in  June,  1877,  on 
the  occasion  of  the  one  hundred  and  fiftieth  anniversary  of 
the  founding  of  the  town  of  Hanover,  Massachusetts.  His 
words  give  an  inner  view  of  the  life  and  character  of  New 
England  towns,  a  subject  which  Mr.  Morgan  viewed  chiefly 
in  its  external  relation  to  history  and  science.  "  I  believe  in 
our  towns,"  said  Mr.  Long.  "  I  believe  in  their  decency  and 
simple  ways.  I  believe  in  their  politics,  in  their  form  and 
administration  of  government,  in  their  school  and  church 
influences,  in  their  democratic  society,  in  their  temperance 
organizations,  in  their  neighborly  charities,  in  their  proud 
lineage  and  history,  and  in  the  opportunities  they  offer.  I 
know  that  our  fathers  who  founded  them  and  put  their 
money  and  labor,  and  their  hopes  into  the  institutions 
and  character  of  these  towns,  did  not  mean  they  should 
decay  ;  that  they  should  be  abandoned,  that  any  native  born 
in  them  should  turn  his  back  upon  them,  or  be  prouder  of  a 
home  elsewhere  than  in  them.  Their  worth  is  not  more  in 
the  things  that  are  seen,  than  in  the  things  that  are  not  seen ; 
not  more  in  the  farm  and  shop  and  academy  and  railroad, 
that  in  the  mellow,  pious,  soft,  refining  influences  of  charac- 
ter which  pervades  them  like  an  atmosphere,  and  exhibits  to 
you  in  humble  cottages  men  and  women  plain  in  manner  and 
dress,  but  of  rare  intelligence  and  refinement;  men  who  think 
and  read  and  are  scholars  and  gentlemen,  however  humble 
their  occupation  ;  women  who  are  poets  and  sisters  of  charity ; 
where  else  do  you  find  the  like?"  * 

It  would  be  easy  to  multiply  eulogies  of  New  England 
towns,  but  difficult  to  voice  more  clearly  their  intrinsic  worth 
and  far-reaching  historic  significance  than  have  the  men  whose 
words  have  been  quoted.  Seen  from  within,  these  New  Eng- 
land towns  and  villages  are  as  full  to-day  of  youthful  fresh- 
ness, quiet  beauty,  and  energetic  life  as  the  demcs  of  Grecian 
Attika,  in  the  spring-time  of  the  world;    seen  from  without 


Report  in  Old  Colonj-  Memorial,  Plymouth,  Mass.,  June  21,  1877. 


8  The  Germanic  Origin  of 

as  an  organic,  deeply  rooted,  wide-ex])anding  growth,  New 
England's  local  institutions  are  like  the  tree  Igdrasil,  of 
8canilinavian  mythology,  for  the  principle  of  local  self-gov- 
ernment which  they  embody,  takes  hold  upon  all  the  past 
and  upholds  the  future  in  its  spreading  branches. 

The  importance  of  towns  in  the  social  and  political  struc- 
ture of  New  England  has  been  recognized  in  passing  by 
discerning  travelers  like  Lafayette  and  Tocqueville,  and, 
indeed,  by  certain  New  England  publicists  and  historians; 
but  most  of  these  notices  have  been  extremely  cursory  and 
more  or  less  inaccurate.  There  is  also  a  vast  number  of  local 
histories,  but  they  generally  avoid  the  one  important  question, 
the  genesis  of  the  town  as  an  institution.  Most  writers,  espe- 
cially local  historians,  assume  that  New  England  towns  are 
either  the  offspring  of  Puritan  virtue  and  of  the  Congrega- 
tional church,  or  else  that  they  are  the  product  of  this  rocky 
8oil,  which  is  sup[)Osed  to  produce  free  institutions  spontane- 
ously, as  it  does  the  arbutus  and  the  oak,  or  fair  women  and 
brave  men.  But  the  science  of  Biology  no  longer  favors  the 
theory  of  spontaneous  generation.  Wherever  organic  life 
occurs  there  must  have  been  some  seed  for  that  life.  History 
should  not  be  content  with  describing  effects  when  it  can 
ex|tlain  causes.  It  is  just  as  improbable  that  free  local  insti- 
tutions should  spring  up  without  a  germ  along  American 
shores  as  that  English  wheat  should  have  grown  here  without 
l)lanting.  Town  institutions  were  propagated  in  New  Eng- 
land by  old  English  and  Germanic  ideas,  brought  over  by 
Pilgrims  and  Puritans,  and  as  ready  to  take  root  in  the  free 
H)il  of  America  as  would  Egyptian  grain  which  had  been 
drying  in  a  mummy-case  for  thousands  of  years. 

The  town  and  village  life  of  New  England  is  as  truly 
the  reproduction  of  Old  English  types  as  those  again  are 
repro(bictions  of  the  village  community  system  of  the  ancient 
Germans.  Investigators  into  American  Institutional  History 
will  turn  as  naturally  to  the  mother  country  as  the  historians 
of   England  turn  toward  their  older  home  beyond  the  German 


New  England  Towns.  9 

Ocean.  "For  the  fatherland  of  the  English  race,"  says 
Green  in  his  History  of  the  English  People,  "we  must  look 
far  away  i'rom  England  itself.  In  the  fifth  centnry  after  the 
birth  of  Christ  the  one  country  which  we  know  to  have  borne 
the  name  of  Angeln  or  England  lay  within  the  district  which 
is  now  called  Sleswick,a  district  in  the  heart  of  the  peninsula 
that  parts  the  Baltic  from  the  Northern  seas.  Its  pleasant 
pastures,  its  black-timbered  homesteads,  its  prim  little  town- 
ships looking  down  on  inlets  of  purple  water,  were  then  but 
a  wild  waste  of  heather  and  sand,  girt  along  the  coast  with  a 
sunless  woodland,  broken  here  and  there  by  meadows  that 
crept  down  to  the  marshes  and  the  sea.  .  .  .  Of  the  temper 
and  life  of  the  folk  in  this  older  England  we  know  little.  But 
irora  the  glimpses  that  we  catch  of  it  when  conquest  had 
brought  them  to  the  shores  of  Britain  their  political  and  social 
organization  must  have  been  that  of  the  German  race  to 
which  they  belonged.  In  their  villages  lay  ready  formed  the 
social  and  political  life  which  is  round  us  in  England  to-day. 
A  belt  of  forest  or  waste  parted  each  from  its  fellow  villages, 
and  within  this  boundary  or  mark  the  *  township,'  as  the 
village  was  then  called  from  the  Uun '  or  rough  fence  and 
trench  *  that  served  as  its  simple  fortification,  formed  a  com- 
plete and  independent  body,  though  linked  by  ties  which 
were  strengthening  every  day  to  the  townships  about  it  and 
the  tribe  of  which  it  formed  a  part.  .  .  . 

"The  woodland  and  pasture-land  of  an  English  village 
were  still  undivided,  and  every  free  villager  had  the  right  of 
turning  into  it  his  cattle  and  swine.  The  meadow-land  lay 
in  like  manner  open  and  undivided  from  hay-harvest  to 
spring.  It  was  only  when  grass  began  to  grow  afresh  that 
the  common  meadow  was  fenced  off  into  grass-fields,  one  for 
each   household   in   the  village;  and   when  hay-harvest   was 


♦According  to  the  laws  of  the  Colony  of  Massachusetts  Bay,  the  boun- 
daries of  Massachusetts  Towns  were  to  be  "  a  greate  heape  of  stones,  or  a 
trench,  of  six  foote  long  &  two  foote  broade." — Mass.  Col..Kec.,  ii,  210. 

2 


JO  2  he  Germanic  Origin  of 

over  fence  and  division  were  at  an  end  a^am.  The  plow-land 
alone  was  permanently  allotted  in  eqnal  shares  both  of  corn- 
land  and  ial low-land,  to  the  families  of  the  freemen,  though 
even  the  plow-land  was  subject  to  fresh  division  as  the  num- 
ber of  claimants  grew  greater  or  less.  .  .  .  The  lilie,  the  sover- 
eignty of  the  settlement  resided  solely  in  the  body  of  the 
freemen  whose  holdings  lay  round  the  moot-hill  or  the  sacred 
tree  where  the  community  met  from  time  to  time  to  deal  out 
it,s  own  justice  and  to  make  its  own  laws.  Here  new  settlers 
were  admitted  to  the  freedom  of  the  townshij),  and  by-laws 
framed  and  headmen  and  tithing-man  chosen  for  its  gover- 
nance. Here  plow-land  and  meadow-land  were  shared  in 
due  lot  among  the  villagers,  and  field  and  homestead  passed 
from  man  to  man  by  the  delivery  of  a  turf*  cut  from  its  soil. 
Here  strife  of  farmer  with  farmer  was  settled  according  to  the 
'customs'  of  the  township  as  its  elder  men  stated  them,  and 
four  men  were  chosen  to  follow  headman  or  ealdorman  to 
liundred-court  or  war.  It  is  with  reverence  such  as  is  stirred 
by  the  sight  of  the  head-waters  of  some  mighty  river  that  one 
looks  back  to  these  village  moots  of  Friesland  or  Sleswick. 
It  was  here  that  England  learned  to  be  a  '  mother  of  Parlia- 
ments.' It  was  in  these  tiny  knots  of  farmers  that  the  men 
from  whom  Englishmen  were  to  spring  learned  the  worth  of 
j)ublic  opinion.  .  .  .  The  'talk'  of  the  village  moot  ...  is 
tiie  groundwork  of  English  history."  f 

I'hus,  English  historians.  Green,  Freeman  and  Stubbs, 
recognize  their  older  fatherland.  The  origin  of  the  English 
Constitution,  as  Montescpiieu  long  ago  declared,  is  found  in 

*  The  custom  of  convoying  land  by  turf  and  twig,  ramo  et  cespiie, 
•ccordine  to  mediceval  usage,  was  once  known  in  Salem.  In  1695,  John 
Riuk  granted  ft  homestead  to  his  son  Thomas  before  witnesses,  and,  as 
I»«rl  of  the  act  of  conveyancing,  took  hold  of  a  twig  in  the  garden,  saying, 
"  Here,  son  Thomas,  I  do,  before  these  two  men,  give  you  possession  of 
Ihi*  land  by  tiirlfc  and  twigg."— Felt,  Annals  of  Salem,  i,  187.  Cf.  Lav- 
eleye,  Primitive  Property,  121,  note  3. 

t  Green,  llistory  of  the  English  People,  vol.  i,  ch.  1. 


New  England  Towns.  1 1 

the  forests  of  Germany.  If  we  read,  said  this  ilhistrious 
Frencliman,  who  was  as  fervent  an  admirer  of  En^huid  as 
Tocqueville  was  of  America,  if  we  read  the  admirable  work 
of  Tacitus  concerning  the  manners  and  customs  of  the  Teu- 
tons, we  shall  find  that  it  was  from  tliem  that  the  Enfjlish 
derived  their  political  system.*  Voltaire  was  accustomed  to 
ridicule  INIontesquieu  for  his  Teutonic  predilections,  but  the 
researches  of  Palgrave,  Kemble,  Stubbs  and  Sir  Henry  Maine 
have  estal)lished  the  truth  of  this  Germanic  view.  The  tree 
of  English  liberty  certainly  roots  in  German  soil.  Proofs  of 
this  fact  were  first  made  fully  apparent  to  English  historians 
by  the  labors  of  those  patient  German  specialists,  Von  Maurer, 
Hanssen,  Meitzen,  Nasse  and  George  Waitz,  who  have  shown 
in  the  early  Constitutional  History  of  Germany  the  same  or- 
ganizing power  as  Canon  Stubbs  has  exercised  in  writing  the 
Constitutional  History  of  England.  The  amount  of  valuable 
details  which  German  specialists  in  Institutional  History  have 
dug  up  from  the  rich  soil  of  mediaeval  Germany  is  something 
marvellous  \f>  contemplate.  To  attemj)t  even  a  resum<;i  in  a 
sketch  of  this  character  would  be  to  attempt  the  impossible. 
But  along  the  lines  of  this  ])ioneer  work,  through  guiding 
vistas  of  light  now  made  in  the  German  forests  by  years  of 
German  toil,  the  American  student  may  wander  at  will, 
noting  such  points  as  may  prove  of  suggestive  interest  to  the 
younger  Germany  and  the  newer  England  beyond  the 
Atlantic. 

The  student  has  only  to  cross  the  river  Neckar  from  Hei- 
delberg to  find  himself  in  the  Odenwald,  or  forest  of  Wodan, 
the  most  classic  as  well  as  the  most  primitive  region  in  all 
Germany.  The  student  has  only  to  travel  a  few  hours  south- 
ward from  the  Odenwald  and  the  Bergstrasse  to  reach  the 
lieart  of  the  Black  Forest.  In  either  of  these  parts  of  Ger- 
many he  can  discover  surviving  features  of  the  ancient  village 
community  system  as  described  by  Tacitus.     With  the  Ger- 

*  Montesquieu,  Esprit  des  Lois,  Livro  xi,  cli.  G. 


12  The  Germanic  Origin  of 

mania  for  a  uuide-book,  let  us  follow  the  student  through  a 
Teutonic  village.  It  is  very  generally  known,  says  Tacitus, 
that  the  Germans  do  not  live  in  cities,  and  also  that  they 
have  no  fondness  for  joining  their  plantations  together.  They 
en'ttle  apart  in  different  places,  according  as  spring,  or  open 
field,  or  woodland  attracts  their  fancy.  Villages  they  jdant, 
not  according  to  our  fashion,  with  closely  connected  or  adjoin- 
ing buildings,  but  every  man  surrounds  his  own  house  with 
a  fence,  either  for  security  against  accident  by  fire,  or  because 
they  are  such  bungling  architects.* 

There  are  two  facts  in  this  statement  by  Tacitus,  which 
deserve  special  attention.  The  first  fact  is,  that  by  the 
expression,  "they  settle  apart  in  different  places,"  colunt 
tliiicrcli  ac  diversi,  is  meant  the  individual  farm  or  patriarchal 
hamlet,  what  the  Germans  call  a  Hof;  the  second  fact  is  that 
bv  the  expression,  "villages  they  plant,"  vicos  locant,  is 
meant  the  village  community,  what  the  Germans  call  a  Dorf. 
Tacitus  probably  saw  what  every  stranger  sees  to  this  day  on 
vis«iting  the  country  villages  of  South  Germany,  namely, 
co(npact  settlements,  but  with  separate  buildings  and  home 
lots,  exactly  like  those  of  a  New  England  farming  town. 
Stniggling  hamlets,  or  isolated  farms,  there  also  must  have 
been  in  the  days  of  Tacitus  as  in  the  days  of  our  Puritan  fore- 
fathers. Doubtless  many  of  these  German  hamlets  grew  into 
villages,  just  as  the  hamlets  or  villages  of  New  England  have 
in  many  cases  grown  into  towns.  The  ending  heim  in  many 
village  names  along  the  Bergstrasse,  like  Dossenheim,  Wein- 
heiin,  is  clear  indication  of  the  original  patriarchal  character 
of  .such  places.  The  German  heim  is  the  same  as  the  English 
home,  Saxon  hum,  which  appears  in  the  names  of  so  many 
old  Engli>h  places  like  Uoddingham,  Billingham,  Petersham, 
Hampton,  (or  Hometown),  and  the  like.  The  distinction 
Wtween  the  hamlet  and  the  village  is  perhaps  one  of  degree 
rather  than  ..tie  of  kind.     The  Hof  became  the  Dorf  by  a 


•TbcjIup,  Germania,  cap.  xvi,  (Baumstark's  edition  for  Students,  58.) 


New  England  Towns.  13 

natural  process  of  develoi)ment.     No  one  can  say  where  the 
hamlet  ends  and  tlie  village  begins. 

But  let  us  proceed  upon  our  tour  of  observation,  Tiie 
traveler  of  to-day  will  find  in  the  interior  of  the  Odenwald  far 
more  primitive  villages  than  in  the  Black  Forest.  The  latter 
is  now  traversed  by  government  roads  in  every  direction,  and 
even  a  railroad  has  been  constructed  in  these  latter  days,  so 
that  hurrying  travelers  can  behold  the  scenery  from  the  cars! 
Things  are  no  longer  what  th.ey  were  when  Auerbach  wrote 
his  Black  Forest  Tales  for  children.  But  there  is  still  much 
left  to  amuse  and  instruct  the  students  who  tramp  through 
the  Forest  every  Whitsuntide  vacation  {Pfingsten)  from  Hei- 
delberg, Freiburg  and  other  German  universities.  The  Oden- 
wald is  also  visited,  but  not  so  frequently  because  it  is  more 
difficult  in  that  primitive  region  to  obtain  food  and  drink, 
except  upon  one  or  two  main  routes.  Traversing  either  the 
government  chaussees  or  the  common  dirt  roads  through  the 
Odenwald  or  Black  Forest,  the  student  may  explore  the 
numerous  valleys  and  forest  villages,  which  are  to  this  day 
skirted  with  evergreen  forests,  dimly  suggesting  to  his  fancy 
the  ambuscades  into  which  the  Roman  legions  fell  when  they 
j)enetrated  the  Teutoburger  Wald.  In  such  forests  liberty 
was  nurtured.  Here  dwelt  the  people  Rome  never  could 
conquer.  In  these  wild  retreats  the  ancient  Teutons  met  in 
council  upon  tribal  matters  of  war  and  peace.  Upon  the 
forest  hill-tops  they  worshipped  Wodan,  the  All  Father;  in 
the  forest  valleys  they  talked  over,  in  village-moot,  the  lowly 
affairs  of  husbandry  and  the  management  of  their  common 
fields.  Here  were  planted  the  seeds  of  Parliamentary  or 
Self-Government,  of  Commons  and  Congresses.  Here  lay  the 
germs  of  religious  reformations  and  of  popular  revolutions, 
the  ideas  which  have  formed  Germany  and  Holland,  England 
and  Xew  England,  the  Uniled  States  in  the  broadest  sense  of 
that  old  Germanic  institution. 

What  now  are  the  external  characteristics  of  one  of  these 
primitive  forest-villages?    Emerging  from  the  wood  or  rocky 


14  The  Germanic  Origin  of 

defile,  the  traveller  comes  suddenly  upon  a  snug  little  settle- 
ment lurched  upon  the  sunny  hillside  or  nestling  in  some 
broadening  meadow.  Surrounded  by  forest,  this  settlement 
is  indeed  a  Mark,  or,  as  Americans  would  say,  a  "clearing." 
liiedeke  is  here  better  than  Tacitus,  and  you  will  discover 
liiat  the  place  is  called  perhaps  Schoenwaid,  or  Beautiful 
Forest,  or  possibly  Schoenau,  or  Beautiful  Meadow.  Such 
vilhu'es  are  usually  planted  near  a  brook  or  some  constant 
stream,  and  frequently  bear  a  name  like  Rohrbach  or  Lauter- 
bnch,  either  of  which  terms  would  signify  the  same  as  Roaring 
Brook,  so  familiar  in  New  England.  An  ancient  part  of 
Salem,  (that  part  which  was  the  home  of  George  Peabody,  the 
philanthropist),  was  once  known  as  Brooksby.  These  Ger- 
man villiKH'S  are  made  up  of  little  houses,  separate  from  one 
another,  but  withal  tolerably  compact,  with  outlying  fields 
divided  into  narrow  strips,  as  shown  by  the  growing  crops. 
Let  us  enter  one  of  these  villages  and  see  how  the  houses  are 
constructed.  The  first  impression  is  that  they  are  rather 
rude  and  bungling.  That  is  exactly  what  Tacitus  thought 
when  he  saw  their  prototypes.  Low-roofed  and  thatched  with 
straw,  which  is  held  down  perhaps  by  stones,  with  wide 
spreading  eaves  and  rude  wooden  frame-work,  filled  in  often- 
times with  rough  stones  plastered  together,  these  huts  alto- 
gether remind  the  modern  traveller  of  Swiss  chalets.  The 
inhabitants  appear  to  live  in  the  upper  part  of  these  one 
storied  buildings,  for  there  is  a  stone  stair-case  outside  leading 
up  to  an  elevated  doorway,  and  underneath  there  is  often  a- 
8tal)le  for  cattle,  although  in  some  houses  calves  and  children 
may  be  seen  growing  up  together.  Underneath  the  projecting 
roof  at  the  gable  ends  of  the  houses  are  beehives  of  wicker 
work,  ujilu'ld  by  a  beam  or  shelf.  If  a  stranger  enters  one  of 
these  forest  villages  on  a  day  in  June,  he  will  hear  nothing 
but  the  humming  of  the  bees;  for  men,  women  and  children 
are  all  in  the  hay-fields. 

And  this  brings  us  to  a  consideration  of  that  old  system  of 
co-operative  husbandry  and  common  fields,  which  are  the 


New  England  Towns.  15 

most  peculiar  features  of  a  German  villajre  community.  In 
the  haying  season,  to  this  day,  in  many  parts  of  Germany,  the 
villagers  may  be  seen  gathering  the  grass-crop  together.  To 
this  day,  in  some  localities,  the  fallow  and  stubble  lands  are 
used  in  common  by  tiie  whole  village  for  the  pasturage  of 
cattle  and  the  feeding  of  swine.  Village  cow-herds,  swine- 
herds and  goose-herds  are  still  employed  in  many  parts  of 
Germany.  To  this  day  the  arable  land  of  the  Mark  is  tilled 
under  certain  communal  laws.  The  time  of  harvesting  and 
the  time  of  allowing  the  cattle  and  swine  of  the  village  to 
enter  upon  the  stubble  lands  is  still  determined  by  agreement 
among  the  inhabitants.  The  narrow,  unfenced  strips  of  land 
stretching  up  the  hillsides  to  the  forest-border,  bear  striking 
evidence  that  they  were  originally  formed  by  the  allotment 
of  some  ancient  common  field. 

In  the  Contemporary  Review,  July,  1881,  there  is  a  pleasant 
picture  of  village  customs  in  the  Thuringian  forest  by  Pro- 
fessor W.  Steadman  Aldis,  in  an  article  entitled,  "Notes  from 
a  German  Village."  The  village  described  is  Gross  Tabarz, 
where  the  Professor  spent  a  summer  vacation  with  his  family. 
"  The  economic  state  of  the  village,  which  is  only  a  type  of 
many  others  in  the  district,  is  decidedly  primitive.  Every 
well-to-do  family  has  its  little  strip  of  ground,  or  sometimes 
several  such  strips  have  been  accumulated  in  one  family  by 
inheritances  or  intermarriages.  The  village  butcher,  with 
whose  family  ours  was  soon  on  tolerably  intimate  terms,  was 
the  owner,  or  at  least  the  cultivator  with  perpetual  rights,  of 
many  little  fields  situated  in  almost  as  many  parishes.  .  .  . 
During  the  spring  and  summer,  while  the  grass  in  the 
meadows  is  allowed  to  grow  for  hay,  or  for  Grummet,  as 
the  second  crop  is  called,  the  cows  and  geese  are  alike  ban- 
ished from  the  private  land,  and  are  taken  under  the  charge 
of  a  Hirt  on  to  the  common  land,  the  borders  of  the  roads, 
or  the  small  bits  of  mountain  meadow  among  the  forests  not 
allotted  by  the  Gemeinde  to  private  owners.  ,  .  .  After  the 
second  crop  of  hay  has  been  all  gathered  in,  which  is  supposed 


1(\         ■  The  Germanic  Origin  of 

to  be  acliieved  by  the  beginning  of  September,  and  for  the 
iratherinix  of  which  the  village  schools  have  a  special  holiday, 
the  meadows  are  open  to  the  cattle  and  geese  of  all  the  inhab- 
itants, and  the  Hirts  have  no  longer  such  an  arduous  task. 
The  pasture  land  becomes  again  for  the  time  the  proi)erty  of 
the  Commune,  the  'common  land'  which  it  originally  was, 
and  is  dotted  with  red  oxen  or  snow-white  geese.  During 
the  months  of  July  and  August,  the  whole  population,  male 
and  female,  is  for  the  most  part  occupied  in  getting  in  the 
crops  of  different  kinds,  which  seem  to  form  a  continuous 
series,  beginning  with  the  first  crop  of  hay,  at  the  beginning 
of  July,  and  ending  with  the  Grummet,  or  second  crop,  early 
in  Seplember." 

Let  us  now  glance  at  our  guide-book  and  see  what  Tacitus 
savs  concerning  the  customs  of  the  ancient  Germans  in  the 
matter  of  land  holdings.  Lands,  he  says,  are  taken  up  peri- 
odically by  the  whole  body  of  cultivators  in  proportion  to 
their  number.  These  lands  they  afterwards  divide  up  among 
themselves  according  to  their  dignity  or  title.  The  wide  extent 
of  open  S|)ace  renders  the  division  of  fields  an  easy  matter. 
The  situation  of  the  plough-lands  they  change  every  year, 
and  there  is  land  enough  left  over.  They  do  not  attempt  to 
improve  by  labor  so  vast  and  fertile  a  tract  of  ground,  for  the 
siike  of  })lanting  orchards,  laying  out  grass-plots,  and  irriga- 
ting gardens;  the  only  crop  they  want  is  wheat  or  barley.* 

In  the  custom,  mentioned  by  Tacitus,  of  shifting  the  situa-  ' 
tion  of  the  ploughed  lands  every  year,  we  may  perhaps  see  a 
germ  of  the  famous  Three  Field  System,  which  is  of  some 
importance  in  tracing  the  historical  connection  between  the 
agrarian  customs  of  England  and  those  of  ancient  Germany. 
The  sy.stem  was  ])robably  perfected  before  the  Saxon  conquest 
of  liritain,  and  has  survived  in  both  countries  until  our  own 
times. 


•On  tlie  exposition  of  cap.  xxvi  of  Tacitus'  Germania,  cf.  Baumstark's 
edili.-n,  Nai-fio-g  Agricultural  Community  of  the  Middle  Ages  (Appendix), 
Hiid  Dr.  Denman  W.  Koss'  "Studies,"  i,  23;  ii,  12. 


New  England  Towns.  17 

Imagine  a  river  valley,  like  that  of  the  Neckar,  which 
skirts  tlic  Odenwald,  and  a  little  stream  flowing  down  from 
the  hillside  forest  into  the  rivqr  below.  In  the  Odenwald 
many  villages  are  built  along  the  line  of  such  streams  or 
brooklets,  which  serve  as  a  kind  of  water  main-street  for  the 
villagers  living  along  the  bank.  The  houses  lie  ai)art,  as 
Tacitus  says  in  his  description  of  a  German  village,  and  every 
villager  has  his  own  houselot  and  enclosure.  The  whole 
village  domain  is  the  Mark,  or  clearing.  It  belonged  orig- 
inally and  belongs  still  to  the  village  community  as  an  organ- 
ized body,  as  a  civic  unit.  Certain  parts,  of  course  the  best, 
were  originally  set  off  for  tillage;  other  parts  remained 
common  for-  wood,  pasture,  and  meadow,  Wald,  Weide,  and 
Wiese.  The  Three  Field  System  relates,  however,  not  to  the 
latter  divisions,  but  to  the  arable  land  and  to  that  only. 

The  land  used  for  tillage  was  divided  up  into  three  great 
fields,  first,  second,  and  third.  Each  villager  had  one  or  more 
lots  in  each  great  field,  but  the  peculiarity  of  the  system  lies 
in  the  fact  that  every  villager  was  obliged  to  jflant  his  lot  or 
lots  in  each  great  field,  according  as  the  whole  village  should 
determine.  For  example,  if  the  proprietors,  in  village-mote 
assembled,  should  resolve  by  a  majority  to  plant  the  first 
great  field  with  wheat,  an  individual  proprietor  would  have 
no  alternative;  he  must  do  as  his  neighbors  agree.  And  so 
of  the  second  great  field,  which,  perhaps,  the  villagers  would 
vote  to  plant  with  oats  or  barley;  and  likewise  of  the  third 
field,  which  must  lie  fallow  for  one  year.  A  rude  system  of 
rotation  of  crops  was  customary  in  all  Teutonic  farming  com- 
munities. The  fallow  land  of  one  year  was  cultivated  the 
year  succeeding;  and  the  spring  crop  of  one  field  gave  place 
to  a  winter  crop,  or  else  lay  fallow  in  turn.  The  most  inter- 
esting fact  about  this  Three  Field  System  is  that  it  indicates 
a  communal  spirit  even  in  the  management  of  lands  allotted 
and  perhaps  owned  in  severalty;  it  shows  that  the  arable 
land  as  well  as  the  pasture,  meadow,  and  woodland,  was  under 
the  control  of  the  village  community  and  subject  to  communal 


jg  The  Germanic  Origin  of 

•leorees.  There  is  reason  to  believe,  from  the  passage  in  Taci- 
tus above  quoted,  that  the  situation  of  the  ploughed  lands 
was  changed  from  time  to  time,  and  that  land  devoted  to 
tilhiire  was  afterwards  turned  into  pasture  or  grass  land,  and 
oilier  portions  of  the  village  domain  were  allotted  for  plough- 
\u(r  in  severalty.  The  custom  of  re-distribnting  farming 
lands,  after  a  certain  term  of  years,  was  very  general,  not 
only  in  Teutonic,  but  in  all  Aryan  villages.  The  term  varied 
with  different  nations  and  in  different  communities.  Origi- 
nally, with  the  Germans,  a  fresh  distribution  was  probably 
made  every  year,  but  as  the  Three  Field  System  developed, 
the  term  became  longer.  In  Russia,  as  Wallace  has  shown 
in  his  interesting  work,  lands  were  once  re-distributed  every 
thirteen  years.  The  field  meetings  of  Teutonic  farmers  for 
ithe  distribution  of  lands  and  the  regulation  of  crops  were  the 
germs  of  English  parish  meetings  and  of  New  England  town 
meetings.  The  village  elders,  still  so  called  in  Russia,  although 
young  men  are  frequently  elected  to  the  office,  are  the  proto- 
type of  the  English  Reeve  and  Four,  and  of  the  New  Eng- 
land Town  Constable  and  Board  of  Selectmen. 

In  the  year  1871  was  published,  in  England,  under  the 
ans|)ices  of  the  Cobden  club,  a  translation  of  a  little  German 
treatise,  by  Professor  Nasse,*  of  the  University  of  Bonn,  on 
the  agricultural  community  of  the  middle  ages  and  inclosures 
of  the  sixteenth  century  in  England.  It  was  a  work  which 
may  be  called  epoch-making  in  the  history  of  real  property 
and  of  conmuinal  institutions  in  Great  Britain.  It  awakened 
English  lawyers  to  a  consciousness  of  the  survival  in  their 
very  miilst  of  a  system  of  local  land  tenure  older  than  the 
Feudal  system  and  dating  back  at  least  to  the  time  of  the 
Saxon  concjuest  of  Britain.  Ever  since  the  days  of  BlaeU- 
Btoue,  lawyers  had  puzzled  themselves  to  account  for  certain 


•  Yirsl  monlioncd  to  Ainerican  readers  by  Professor  William  F.  Allen 
in  The  Nation,  Se|(leniber  '2.2,  1870,  from  a  notice  in  Sybel's  Historische 
Xeiltchrift. 


Neio  England  Towns.  19 

extraordinary  customs  of  village  land  holding  in  England, 
for  certain  phenomena  of  joint  ownership  in  commons,  like 
the  lammas  lands,  which  were  common  to  an  entire  village 
for  pasturage,  after  the  13th  of  August,  old  style,  or  like  the 
so-called  "shack  lands,"  wiiich,  after  the  above  date,  were 
common  to  the  owners  or  possessors,  but  not  to  the  whole 
village.  Lawyers  had  found  no  solution  to  the  problem  of 
the  origin  of  such  communal  practice,  except  in  special  j)rivi- 
leges  granted  to  tenants  by  the  lord  of  the  manor,  or  else  in 
immemorial  custom. 

Professor  Nasse  derived  his  facts  concerning  the  existence 
of  such  communal  land-holdings  in  England,  from  a  report 
of  a  Select  Committee  on  Commons  Inclosure,  instituted  in 
order  to  frame  laws  for  the  dissolution  of  common  holdings, 
by  order  of  the  House  of  Commons,  1844,  and  from  the 
reports  of  the  Board  of  Agriculture,  about  the  beginning  of 
the  present  century,  under  charge  of  Sir  John  Sinclair.  These 
latter  reports  were  abridged  by  Mr.  Marshall,  a  man  often 
referred  to  by  Sir  Henry  Maine.  It  appears  that  Marshall  at 
this  very  early  period  was  strongly  impressed  by  the  mere 
facts  concerning  the  vast  extent  of  communal  land-holdings 
in  England,  and  had  come  to  the  conclusion  that  once  "the 
soil  of  nearly  the  whole  of  England  was  more  or  less  in  a 
commonable  state."* 

The  reports  above  mentioned  revealed  some  most  remarka- 
ble facts  concerning  the  survival  of  communal  land  holdings 
in  parishes  where  the  Feudal  system  was  supposed  to  have 
centralised  all  forms  of  folkland,  and  to  have  destroyed  all  free 
peasant  ])ro])rietaries.  In  Huntingtonshire,  out  of  240,000 
acres,  130,000  were  found  to  be  held  in  common,  that  is,  by 
no  individual  owners  in  particular,  but  by  village  or  farming 
communities,  uniler  the  supremacy  of  some  manorial  lord. 


*  Nasse  on  the  Agricultural  Community  of  the  MidJle  Ages  and  Inclo- 
surcs  of  the  Sixteenth  Century  in  England.  London:  Maciuilhin  &,  Co., 
1871. 


20  The  Gei-manic  Origin  of 

111  AViltshirc,  bv  far  the  largest  part  of  the  land  was  thus 
lielil;  in  Berkshire,  one-half  the  county;  in  Warwickshire, 
60,000  acres;  and  in  Oxfordshire,  over  one  hundred  parishes 
held  lands  on  the  communal  system;  and  in  Northampton- 
shire eighty-nine  parishes  perpetuated  this  ancient  type  of 
village  land  holding.  Nasse  says,  "in  by  far  the  greater 
part  "of  England  the  old  English  peasantry  .  .  .  held  the 
land  in  common,  precisely  as  the  present  villagers  of  the 
greater  part  of  middle  Europe  hold  theirs."  * 

There  were  found  to  be  three  sorts  of  commonable  ground. 
1,  arable;  2,  meadow ;  and  3,  pasture  land.  The  arable 
land  was  Ibund  very  generally  to  be  subject  to  certain  com- 
munal laws,  in  regard  to  tiie  rotation  or  harvesting  of  crops. 
The  Three  Field  System,  as  already  described,  was  frequently 
discovered  in  English  parishes,  and  it  was  also  noticed  that 
the  three  great  divisions  of  arable  land  were  often  separated 
from  one  another  by  broad  strips  of  grass  land,  which  were 
kept  common,  in  order  to  eke  out  the  pasture  in  the  fall  of 
the  year  after  the  crops  had  been  gathered  and  the  stubble 
lands  thrown  open  to  the  village  cattle.  The  meadow  lands 
were  either  held  wholly  in  common,  or  by  a  system  of  shifting 
peveraltics,  whereby  grass-lots  were  assigned  for  the  season  to 
individuals,  and  were  then  again  made  common  for  pas- 
turage and  subject  to  a  fresh  distribution.!  Community  of 
})asturage  was  found  to  be  of  very  general  occurrence  in 
the  rural  districts  of  England.  There  were  two  sorts, 
stinted  pasturage,  i.  e.,  where  villagers  were  limited  as  to' 


♦Naggp,  6,  9,  of.  extract  from  Marshall,  p.  100:  "Each  parish  and 
township  (at  least  in  the  more  central  and  northern  districts)  comprised 
dilTtTent  descriptions  of  land,  having  been  subjected  during  successive 
BUfa  to  »p<.-cilied  modes  of  occupancy  under  ancient  and  strict  regulations, 
which  lime  had  converted  into  law.  These  parochial  arrangements, 
h<iwever,  varied  somewhat  in  the  different  districts,  but  in  the  more  cen- 
Irnl,  and  preatpr  jiart  of  the  kingdom,  not  widely." 

+  Thi«  cutttijm  was  maintained  for  years  in  the  farming  communities 
of  Plymouth  and  tialem,  Massachusetts. 


New  England  Towns.  21 

tlie  number  of  cattle  they  could  pasture  in  the  common 
field,  (for  example,  it  was  often  the  rule  that  no  one  should 
pa.'^ture  in  commons  more  stock  than  he  could  keep  through 
the  winter);  and  unstinted  })asturage,  where  there  was  no 
such  limit. 

Such  phenomena  as  these  had  been  frequently  observed  in 
England  and  Scotland.  Sir  Walter  Scott  remarked  such 
agricultural  customs  in  the  Orkney  and  Shetland  islands,  but 
was  unable  to  ex|)lain  them  satisfactorily  to  himself.  It  was, 
as  Sir  Henry  Maine  says,  by  using  Von  Maurer's  results  as  a 
key,  that  Nasse  was  able  to  decipher  the  whole  system.  The 
English  Agricultural  Community,  of  the  Middle  Ages,  which 
survived  the  crushing  weight  of  feudalism  and  has  perpetu- 
ated itself  down  to  our  own  times,  stands  forth  as  the  historic 
survival  of  the  Teutonic  village  with  its  Three  Field  System. 
Under  the  very  heel  of  the  Norman  conqueror,  the  old  com- 
munal spirit  of  the  Saxons  endured.  It  endured  in  the 
townships  and  parishes  of  England.  It  has  endured  upon 
almost  every  Lord's  manor,  where  there  was  almost  invariably 
a  large  tract  of  land  known  as  the  Common  or  Lord's  Waste. 
Upon  this  tract,  landless  tenants  preserved  certain  immemorial 
common  rights,  for  example,  to  wood  and  turf,  to  grass  and 
pasture.  These  rights  were  only  vestiges  of  the  ancient  rights 
of  Saxon  villagers,  but  these  rights  to  commonage  serve  as  a 
connecting  link  between  the  manorial  system  of  Mediaeval 
England  and  the  Village  Community  system  of  Ancient 
Germany.  The  periodical  assignment  of  portions  of  the 
Lord's  Waste  for  cultivation  by  the  peasants  was  in  the  Court 
Leet  (German  Leufe,  people)  or  popular  court  of  the  Manor, 
in  which  court  all  minor  matters  relating  to  tenants  were 
adjusted.  In  the  customs  of  the  Court  Leet  and  of  the  old 
English  Parish  meeting,  which  is  but  the  ecclesiastical  out- 
come of  old  Saxon  self-governing  assemblies,  is  to  be  found 
the  prototype  of  New  England  town  meetings. 

Nasse  has  truly  observed  that  "agrarian  relations  have  a 
tendency  to  a  more  lasting  duration  than  other  human  insti- 


22  The  Germanic  Ongin  of 

unions."  *  Tlie  extent  of  Common  Lands  in  England,  which 
have  survived,  not  only  Feudalism,  but  Parliamentary  Acts 
for  Commons  Enclosure,  is  something  enormous.  The  report 
of  landowners  prepared  by  the  Local  Government  Board  a 
few  vears  :igi>,  sliows  that  there  are  still  over  a  million  and 
a  half  acres  of  Common  Land,  f  and  the  report  of  the 
Conunons  Preservation  Society  says  that  "five  million  acres 
of  Common  Land  have  been  enclosed  since  Queen  Anne's 
rejirn.  "  Much  of  the  land  remaining  unenclosed  is  called 
"lV)wn  Land"  or  "Commons;"  it  consists  of  great  open 
ppaces  and  public  fields  or  heaths,  upon  which  villagers  pas- 
ture their  cattle  and  boys  play  ball.  Societies  have  been 
formed  for  the  jjreservation  of  these  tracts,  especially  when, 
like  Ilampstead  Heath,  they  are  in  the  vicinity  of  large  cities. 
Essjivs  on  the  advantage  of  "  Open  Spaces,"  and  on  the 
"  Future  of  Our  Commons,"  have  appeared  in  the  English 
reviews.  Mr.  Lel'evre,  in  a  letter  to  the  Times,  quoted  by 
Octavia  Hill,  says :  "  The  right  of  the  public  to  use  and  enjoy 
Cotumons,  (which  they  have  for  centuries  exercised),  it  must 
be  admitted,  is  not  distinctly  recognised  by  law,  though  there 
is  a  remarkable  absence  of  adverse  testimony  on  the  subject. 
The  law,  however,  most  fully  recognises  the  right  of  the 
village  to  its  green,  and  allows  the  establishment  of  such  right 
by  evitlcnce  as  to  playing  games,  etc.,  but  it  has  failed  as  yet 
to  rcf'ognise  the  analogy  between  the  great  town  and  its 
C(»inniot),  and  the  village  and  its  green,  however  complete  the 
anal«»gy  may  be.  But  some  of  these  rights  of  Common,  which 
are  now  so  i)rized  as  a  means  of  keeping  Commons  open,  had, 
if  legal  theory  is  correct,  their  origin  centuries  ago  in  custom. 
For  long  they  had  no  legal  existence,  but  the  courts  of  law  at 
last  Uarncd  to  recognise  custom  as  conferring  rights.  The 
cu-tom  has  altered  in  kind  ;  in  lieu  of  cattle,  sheep,  and  pigs 
tiinx-ij  out  to  j)a.sture  on  the  Commons,  human  beings  have 


•>■«•►'•,  1:5. 

tOcUvia  Hill,  "Our  Common  Lund,"  8. 


New  England  Towns.  23 

taken  their  place,  and  wear  down  tlie  turf  instead  of  eating 
it." 

We  have  seen  how  the  Saxons  transferred  from  ancient 
Germany  to  the  eastern  part  of  England  the  village  commu- 
nity system  and  agrarian  customs  of  their  forefathers;  let  us 
now  see  how  the  dominant  or  communal  idea  of  these  villages 
and  some  of  these  old  Teutonic  practices  in  the  matter  of 
land-holding,  were  transferred  across  another  and  broader  sea 
than  the  German  ocean,  and  took  root  in  the  eastern  parts  of 
New  England.  States  are  not  founded  upon  shipboard,  though 
the  vessel  be  as  staunch  as  the  Mayflower,  and  constitutions 
cannot  be  framed  upon  paper,  though  it  be  the  Pilgrims' 
com{)act. 

A  band  of  Saxon  pirates  tossing  upon  the  waves  of  the 
North  Sea  and  preparing  to  descend  upon  the  coasts  of  Britain 
could  not  constitute  a  State,  in  passage,  however  excellent 
their  discipline,  however  faithful  their  allegiance  to  the 
authority  of  Hengist  and  Horsa.  But  those  Saxon  pirates 
bore  with  them  a  knowledge  of  self-government,  whicii,  when 
rooted  in  the  soil  of  Britain,  grew  into  Saxon  England  and 
the  law  of  the  land.  Mafrna  Carta  and  the  Bill  of  liiirhts 
are  only  the  development  of  those  germs  of  liberty  first  planted 
in  the  communal  customs  of  our  Saxon  forefathers.  The 
Constitution  of  England  is  not  written  at  all;  it  is  simply  a 
rich  but  sturdy  growth  of  popular  institutions,  derived  orig- 
i^ially  from  the  forests  of  Germany,  and  transjdanted  across 
the  sea.  What  is  thus  maintained  and  acknowledged  con- 
cerning our  Saxon  forefathers,  may  likewise  be  urged  con- 
cerning the  Pilgrim  fathers.  They  were  merely  one  branch 
of  the  great  Teutonic  race,  a  single  offshoot  from  the  tree  of 
liberty  which  takes  deep  hold  upon  all  the  past.  This  offshoot 
was  transplanted  to  Plymouth,  and  it  grew  up,  not  like  Leb- 
anon, filling  the  whole  earth,  but,  to  all  appearances,  like  the 
first  Saxon  settlements  of  England  and  like  other  forms  of 
local  self-government,  budding,  spreaditig,  and  propagating 
after  its  kind. 


24  The  Germanic  Ongin  of 

The  i.uj.M,  u.iu'o  of  the  territorial  factor  in  the  constitution 
of  IMymouth  CoK)uy  has  never  been  sufficiently  emphasized. 
The  iH?re«nal  factor,  i.  c,  the  character,  the  virtues,  and  the 
rvligious  real  of  the  Pilgrims  do  not  need  to  be  further 
exIoIliHl.  Americans  are  in  no  danger  of  forgetting  the  faith 
anil  licr\>i.sin  of  those  men  and  women  who  made  their  flight 
in  winter  acra>vs  a  barren  sea  to  preserve  the  rights  of  con- 
N'ieniv,  the  rights  of  Englishmen,  and  good  old  English  ways, 
but  Americans,  in  their  enthusiasm  for  men,  have  failed  to 
ijoliiv  ivriain  important  and  fundamental  things  in  the  origin 
of  IMvmoulh.  Underneath  all  the  phenomena  of  Pilgrim 
xeal  and  suffering,  more  enduring  than  the  Pilgrims'  noble 
ciiMipaet,  unnoticed  liUe  the  upholding  power  of  earth,  lies  the 
primordial  tact  of  the  local  settlement  of  the  Pilgrims  in  a 
form  of  civic  community  older  than  Saxon  England,  older 
than  the  primitive  church,  and  older  than  the  classic  states  of 
aiuicjuitv.  That  form  of  civil  community  was  based  upon 
land. 

The  elements  of  permanence  and  continuity  in  all  civil 
society  are  based  uj)()n  the  soil  and  the  material  interests 
connecteil  with  it.  Generations  of  men  are  born  and  pass 
away,  but  an  abiding  relation  to  some  fixed  territory  keeps 
civil  wK'iety  together  and  constitutes  a  state  in  the  true  sense 
of  thai  term.  Government  may  exist  upon  shipboard  or 
amoug  wandering  tribes  of  Indians,  but  no  state  or  body 
|Hiliiic  Gxw  po.s-sibly  endure  unless  it  be  grounded  upon  terri- 
torial interests  of  a  stable  and  lasting  character.  No  state 
without  a  people,  and  no  state  without  land.  These  are  the 
axioms  of  political  science. 

Let  us  now  incpiire  into  the  exact  nature  of  the  common- 
wealth which  the  Pilgrims  actually  founded.  Mourt's  rela- 
tion, (so  called  from  George  Morton,  who  published  it  in 
England  in  1622),  a  journal  of  the  beginnings  and  proceed- 
inj^  of  the  English  'plantation  settled  at  Plymouth  in  New 
KnjjIamI,  a  journal  written,  says  Mr.  Dexter,  from  day  to  day 
on  the  ground,  gives  us  the  best  contemporary  account  of  the 


New  England  Towns.  25 

moile  ill  wliich  the  first  village  republic  in  New  England  was 
jjlanted.  None  of  the  so-called  colony  records  go  back  to  the 
foundation  of  the  colony  itself.  But  Mourt  tells  the  whole 
story  from  the  first  landing,  down  to  the  town  meeting  of 
April  2,  1621,  when  Mr,  John  Carver  was  re-elected  governor, 
being  a  man  well  api)roved. 

"After  our  landing  and  viewing  of  the  places  as  well  as  we 
could,  we  came  to  a  conclusion,  [December  30]  by  most 
voyces,  to  set  on  the  maine  Land,  in  the  first  place  on  a  high 
ground  where  there  is  a  great  deale  of  Land  cleared  and  hath 
beene  planted  with  Corne  three  or  four  years  agoe,  and  there 
is  a  very  sweet  brooke  runnes  vnder  the  hillside  and  many 
delicate  springs  of  as  good  water  as  can  be  drunke,  .  .  . 
Thursday,  the  28.  of  December,  [January  7,  N.  S.]  so  many 
as  could  went  to  worke  on  the  hill  where  we  purposed  to 
build  our  platforme  for  our  Ordinance,  and  which  doth  com- 
mand all  the  plaine  and  the  Bay,  and  from  whence  we  may 
see  farre  into  the  sea,  and  might  be  easier  impayled,  having 
two  rowes  of  houses  and  a  faire  street.  So  in  the  afternoon  we 
went  to  measure  out  the  grounds,  and  first,  we  tooke  notice 
how  many  Families  they  were,  willing  all  single  men  that 
had  no  wiues  to  ioyne  with  some  Familie,  as  they  thought 
fit,  that  so  we  might  build  fewer  houses,  which  was  done,  and 
we  reduced  them  to  19.  Families;  to  greater  Families  we 
allotted  larger  plots,  to  euery  person  halfe  a  pole  in  breadth, 
and  three  in  length,  and  so  Lots  were  cast  where  euery  man 
should  lie,  which  was  done,  and  staked  out." — [Mourt's  Rela- 
tion, edited  by  H.  M.  Dexter,  64,  67,  68.] 

On  this  tract  of  cleared  land,  or  the  village  Mark,  on  the 
north  side  of  the  "  very  sweet  brooke,"  which,  like  the  springs 
spoken  of  by  Tacitus,  still  attracted  Teutonic  fancy,  and  which 
is  known  to  this  day  as  the  Town  Brook,  arose  the  first  town 
or  village  community  in  New  England.  The  first  work  was 
the  construction  of  the  so-called  Common  House,  "about 
twenty  loot  square,"  say's  Bradford,  "for  their  common  use, 
to  receive  them  and  their  goods."  The  land  was  taken  pos- 
4 


26  The  Germanic  Origin  of 

TCSsion  of  as  a  communal  domain,  and  tlie  first  labor  bestowed 
U|K)n  it  was  communal  labor.  But  the  Pilgrims,  like  the 
ancient  Teutons,  knew  well  that  a  principle  of  individuality 
must  enter  into  the  development  of  communal  life.  Like  the 
Teutons,  the  Pilgrims  regarded  the  family  as  the  unit  of  social 
ortier,  and  gave  scope  for  family  interests  in  the  division  of 
house-lots  ami  in  the  construction  of  private  dwellings.  Like 
the  Teutons  again,  the  Pilgrims  took  up  land  in  proportion 
to  their  number  and  immediate  wants.  Speaking  of  the  size 
of  the  family  allotments,  the  Journal  says,  "we  thought  this 
proportion  was  large  enough  at  the  first,  for  houses  and 
g:irdens,  to  impale  them  around,  considering  the  weaknes  of 
our  people,"  etc.  Here,  too,  by  a  curious  chance,  an  old 
Teutonic  idea  appears  in  the  notion  of  fencing  and  impaling. 
The  radical  idea  of  a  town  (from  Tan,  Zim,  modern  German 
Ziiuu,  a  hedge)  is  that  of  a  place  hedged-in,  for  the  sake  of 
protection. 

"Tuesday  the  9.  January,"  [l9th  N.  S.]  continues  the 
Journal,  "  was  a  reasonable  faire  day,  and  wee  went  to  labour 
that  day  in  the  building  of  our  towne,  in  two  rowes  of  houses 
for  more  safety:  we  divided  by  lott  the  plot  of  ground 
whereon  to  build  our  Towne." 

Professor  Parker,  in  his  paper  read  before  the  Massachu- 
setts Historical  Society  on  "The  Origin,  Organization,  and 
Influence  of  the  Towns  of  New  England,"*  was  condemning 
original  sources  when  he  criticised  Mr.  Baylies  for  using  the 
word  "Town"  in  his  Historical  Memoirs  of  New  Plymouth 
as  (lescriptive  of  the  Plantation  made  in  1620.  Baylies  only 
paraphrased  the  quotation  above  made  when  he  said  the 
emigrants  foun«l  "a  high  hill  which  could  be  fortified  in  a 
manner  so  as  to  command  the  surrounding  country,"  and 
re^olve<l  "to  lay  out  a  town." 

Palfrey,  in  his  history  of  New  England,  says  "the  name 
towu  finit  occurs  in  the  record  of  the  second  colonial  meeting 

•  I'row^ingB  of  the  Mass.  Hist.  Soc.,  Jan.,  1866. 


New  England  Towns.  27 

of  llie  Court  of  Assistants,  in  connection  with  tiie  naming  (in 
1630)  of  Boston,  Charlestown,  and  Watertown."  *  This  state- 
ment may  have  been  intended  to  apply  solely  to  tiie  Massa- 
chusetts coU)ny,  but  inasmucij  as  the  autlior  is  calling  attention 
to  the  "early  origin"  of  New  England  Towns,  it  is  but  fair 
to  note  that  the  name  "Town"  occurs  ten  years  earlier  than 
1G30,  and  that  in  the  first  records  of  Plymouth.  And  the 
word  is  frequently  used  in  Young's  Chronicles  of  the  Pilgrim 
Fathers  and  in  Plymouth  Colony  Records  in  such  a  clear 
sense  that  no  one  can  possibly  doubt  but  that  Plymouth  vil- 
lage communities  had  not  only  the  name  of  "  Town  "  but  the 
actual  thing,  yes,  the  old  Scandinavian  Thing,  tUe  Saxon  Tun 
Gemot,  in  their  frequent  Town  iSIeetings.  ''  There  already — 
ay,  in  the  Mayflower's  cabin,  before  they  set  foot  on  shore," 
said  Rufus  Choate,  "was  representative  government.  .  .  . 
there  already  was  the  legalized  and  organized  town,  that  sem- 
inary and  central  point,  and  exemplilication  of  elementary 
democracy.  .  .  .  There  was  reverence  of  law,"t  and  upon 
this  ancient  Saxon  basis,  the  Devonian  rock  of  England,  were 
founded  the  institutions  of  a  new  world.  | 

The  original  idea  of  New  England  Towns,  like  that  of 
their  Old  English  and  Germanic  j)rototypes,  was  that  of  a 
village  community  of  allied  families,  settled  in  close  proximity 

*  Palfrey,  History  of  New  England,  i.  380. 

f  Life  and  Writings  of  Rufus  Choate,  i.  285. 

J  In  a  monograpli  upon  Plymouth  Plantations  will  be  shown  the  influ- 
ence of  English  precedent  uj)on  Plymouth  law  and  institutions.  The 
ecclesiastical  theory  that  "  The  Town  corporatior!  is  the  oflspring  of 
Puritan  Congregationalism,"  asserted  strangely  enough  in  reference  to 
Plymouth  Colony  (which  was  not  Puritan  but  Sei)aratist)  by  Dr.  Joseph 
S.  Clark,  in  his  Historical  fcjketch  of  the  Congregational  Churches  of 
Iklassachusetts,  (p.  56),  is  entirely  untenable,  and  so  likewise  is  the  theory 
of  Professor  Parker,  Frothingham  and  other  writers,  that  the  Town 
system  is  peculiarly  the  product  of  New  England  and  not  based  upon 
precedent.  There  is  scarcely  a  feature  of  New  England  Town  Life  which 
has  not  its  prototype  in  the  municipal  history  of  the  mother  country. 
Studies  illustrating  this  view  have  been  made  of  the  leading  Town  Insti- 
tutions of  Massachusetts, 


2U  The  Geiinonic  Origin  of 

i..i  .^,..-.  ...  i-liborhood  and  defense,  ^vith  homes  and  home  lots 
ftfiiml  in  ai'd  owneil  in  severalty,  but  with  a  common  Town 
Sirvet  ami  a  Vinaj:e(;iven  or  Home  Pastnre,and  with  common 
fiehls,  aMottod  outside  the  Town  lor  individual  mowing  and 
tillage  l>ut  fencvil  in  common,  together  with  a  vast  surround- 
inj;  tract  o(  ahsohitely  common  and  undivided  land,  used  for 
{liiiiture  and  wootiland  under  communal  reguhUions.  It  is 
im|>oriant  to  observe  that,  historically  speaking,  the  word 
"Town"  appliis  more  particuhirly  to  the  village  itself,  and 
that  the  wonl  •' Townsliij),"  which  is  of  very  common  occur- 
rence in  the  early  local  annals  of  New  England,  better  char- 
oclerize-s  the  Town's  landed  domain.  It  is  true  that  the 
latter  term  has  fallen  into  disuse  in  New  England,  and  for- 
tunately so,  for  with  the  definite  legal  idea  now  attached  to 
this  word  Township  in  the  Western  ^States,  as  a  tract  of  land 
bix  miles  square,  the  term  no  longer  characterizes  our  Towns, 
which  are  far  from  being  of  any  definite  size  or  of  any  regular 
pattern.  The  word  "Town"  is  now  almost  universally 
employed  in  New  England  to  characterize  the  whole  extent 
of  the  Town's  domain,  and  properly,  for  almost  everywhere 
|)opulation  has  swarmed  from  its  old  village-iiive,  and  houses 
are  now  built  from  one  end  of  the  Town  to  the  other.  But 
it  i»  curious  to  see  how  popular  usage  still  clings  to  the  old 
idea,  when,  for  example,  persons  living  at  the  "ends  of  the 
Town,"  talk  abcnit  going  "into  Town,"  "into  the  village," 
or  to  the  "centre."  The  idea  of  a  Town  is  like  that  of  the 
Greek  (Lrrv  in  distinction  from  the  ttoAi;  ;  or  the  Latin  w6s 
in  dittinctiun  from  civitaa.  This  historical  view  is  borne  out 
by  the  iUlinition  of  a  "  Town  "  given  by  President  Dwight 
in  hi."*  famous  Travels  in  New  England  and  New  York,  begun 
at  the  ••lose  of  the  last  century,  when  he  wrote,  "You  must 
rfjucmber  that  by  a  Town  I  all  along  intend  a  collection  of 
houMCH  in  the  original  village,  and  not  those  of  the  township." 
Let  us  turn  now  to  an  early  description  of  the  Town  of 
Plyniouth,  written  by  Isaack  de  liasieres,  a  French  Protest- 
ant  in   the  service  of  the   Dutch    West  India  Company   as 


New  England  Towns.  29 

Chief  Commissary  of  New  Netherlands  (New  York),  wlio 
visited  Plymouth  in  1627  upon  an  embassy,  and  whom  Gov- 
ernor Bradford  called  "a  man  of  fair  and  genteel  behavior." 
De  Rasieres  wrote  concerning  New  Plymouth  an  interesting 
letter,  which  was  discovered  some  years  ago  in  the  archives 
at  the  Hague*  by  John  Romeyn  Brodhead,  Secretary  of  the 
American  Legation  at  London.  The  letter  was  first  ])rinted 
in  the  Collections  of  the  New  York  Historical  Society.  The 
following  is  a  brief  extract: 

"New  Plymouth  lies  on  the  slope  of  a  hill  stretching  east 
towards  the  sea-coast,  with  a  broad  street  about  a  cannon  shot 
of  eight  hundred  [yards]  long,  leading  down  the  hill,  with  a 
[street]  crossing  in  the  middle,  northwards  to  the  rivulet, 
and  southwards  to  the  land.  The  houses  are  constructed  of 
hewn  planks,  with  gardens  also  enclosed  behind  and  at  the 
sides  with  hewn  planks,  so  that  their  houses  and  court-yards 
are  arranged  in  very  good  order,  with  a  stockade  against 
sudden  attack  ;  and  at  the  ends  of  the  streets  there  are  throe 
wooden  gates."  f 

Town  gates  and  stockades  were  very  common  in  early  New 
England  villages,  where  they  served  not  only  for  defence, 
but  for  agrarian  and  pastoral  ])urposes.  Upon  the  frontier, 
for  example  in  the  Connecticut  valley,  palisaded  Towns  were 
at  one  time  a  military  necessity.  The  original  idea  of  a  Town 
reappears  in  the  local  records  of  Northampton,  Hatfield, 
Deerfield,  and  Greenfield;  for  example,  John  Dickinson  of 
Hatfield  was  allowed,  by  vote  March  6,  161)0,  *' liberty  to 
remove  his  house  into  town  "  and  retain  his  lot  outside  pro- 
vided he  do  his  share  of  fortifying  and  build  again  upon  his 
lot  when  he  could  do  so  without  fear  of  the  Indians.  *'  For 
many  several  years,"  says  Judd  in  his  manuscript  collections 


*The  use  of  the  article  in  the  name  of  this  Town,  the  Hague,  German 
der  Haag,  French  la  Haye,  is  extremely  interesting  as  an  historical  sur- 
vival.   Here  is  a  developed  Teutonic  village  called  to  this  day  The  Hedge, 
just  as  the  English  word  Town  perpetuates  the  idea  of  the  Saxon  Tun. 
f  Collections  of  tlie  New  York  Historical  Society,  New  Series,  vol.  ii. 


30  The  Germanic  Origin  of 

«»n  Hatfield,  "  tlu'  inhabitants  were  cooped  up  within  these 
limits.  Many  had  luits  or  liouses  in  the  street."  *  In 
GretMifieKl  it  was  voted  on  Soj)teniber  10,  1754  "to  j)icquet 
thrti'  houses  in  this  district  immediately."  Individual  houses 
were  frefjiientiy  thus  impaled,  and  it  is  not  improbable  that 
the  use  of  |»ieket  fences  to  this  day  for  separate  inclosures  in 
the  rural  districts  nmy  be  a  remote  survival  of  that  old  Saxoa 

•JuJd.  MS.,  Hadley  and  Hatfield,  i,  148.  The  late  Sylvester  Judd, 
nutliur  of  tlie  History  of  Hadley,  one  of  the  best  local  histories  ever 
written  in  New  Enijiund,  left  behind  him  an  extensive  luanuseript  col- 
K"Ction,  in  many  bound  volumes,- of  materials  relating  to  the  history  of 
the  Connecticut  Valley,  particularly  of  Northampton  and  of  the  tovsrns 
in  that  environment.  It  is  unfortunate  for  this  latter  Town,  one  of  the 
richest  and  rarest  in  New  England  for  historical  interest,  that  so  capable 
a  man  aj<  Mr.  Judd  was  never  in  position,  by  reason  of  his  pressing 
dutii's  as  editor  of  a  country  paper,  to  write  a  history  of  the  valley.  But 
his  manuscript  trea.sures  have  now  been  purchased  by  public-spirited 
citizens,  and  it  is  to  be  hoped  that  this  collection,  wb.ich  is  really  the 
corner-stone  of  Northampton  history,  may  be  the  first  acquisition  of  the 
Forbes  Library,  that  recent  munificent  endowment  of  over  two  hun- 
dred thousand  dollars  by  a  late  citizen  of  the  Town  for  a  free  public 
library  composed  "of  works  of  science  and  the  arts,  in  their  broadest 
acci'ptation.  of  ancient  and  modern  history,  and  of  the  literatures  of  our 
own  and  other  nations."  (Hlxtract  from  the  Will  of  Judge  Forbes).  The 
Forb<«  Library,  the  Clark  Institute,  Smith  College  and  the  Smith  Chari- 
ties are  noble  institutions,  and  yet  they  sprang,  historically,  from  seed 
sown  by  those  simple  agrarian  communities,  Northampton  and  Hatfield, 
which  are  worthy  of  more  than  passing  attention.  The  Town  Records 
of  Norlhumjiton,  are  of  remarkable  interest  and  full  of  cases  of  "  sur- 
vivnl."  Secluded  from  association  with  the  Bay  Towns  as  were  the>e 
inland  comtnunitit'S  of  the  Connecticut  Valley,  some  of  them  like  Wind- 
sor, Springfield  and  the  Towns  above,  are  really  more  interesting  than 
many  thtit  lie  further  to  the  eastward.  These  Valley  Towns  are  not  only 
quite  as  ancient  as  the  average  of  seventeenth  century  Towns,  but  on  the 
whole  rather  more  conservative,  less  influenced  even  by  Puritan  innova- 
tions. 

To  the  courtesy  of  the  Judd  family  and  of  Mr.  J.  R.  Trumbull,  the 
writer  of  this  monograph  has  been  indebted  for  the  use  of  the  Judd 
manutcripU  at  various  intervals  and  for  various  purposes  ;  also  to  Mr. 
Billings,  K''gi?ter  of  Deeds  in  the  County  of  Hampshire,  for  access  to 
cwrly  records  of  the  county  court  and  for  copious  extracts  from  the  Town 
K«curd«  of  Ilatfleld. 


New  England  Towns.  31 

instinct  for  palisading  every  indivithial  home  and  house-lot, 
as  we  have  already  seen  iti  the  case  of  Plymouth. 

An  interesting  commentary  on  the  relation  of  the  indi- 
vidual home  and  hamlet  to  the  Town  or  village  community, 
similarly  enclosed,  is  given  in  Nasse's  Agricultural  Commu- 
nity in  the  Middle  Ages  (15),  where  he  says,  "The  names  of 
])lace8  shows  that,  among  the  Saxons,  only  the  dwelling- 
j)lace  —  that  is,  house  and  homestead  —  was  inclosed;  the 
arable  land  and  the  pastures  being  open  and  utifenced.  Out 
of  1,200  names  of  j)laees  which  Leo  collected  from  the  first 
volume  of  Kemble's  'Codex  Diplomat,  ^vi  Saxonici/  187 
were  formed  with  tun.  This  word,  it  is  well  known,  is  iden- 
tical with  the  modern  '  town,'  the  Dutch  tuin  (garden),  and 
the  German  zaun,  and  was,  as  R.  Schmid  remarks,  less  used 
by  the  Anglo-Saxons  to  signify 'that  wherewith  a  space  is 
inclosed,  than  the  inclosed  space  itself.'  AVe  may,  however, 
see  very  plainly  that  it  was  principally  house  and  homestead 
which  bore  this  name;  for  instance,  in  the  laws  of  Alfred  I. 
§  2,  in  cyninges  tune;  §  13,  on  eorles  tune.  Even  at  the 
j)resent  day  the  courtyard  in  the  country  in  England  is  signi- 
fied by  the  word  town.  Apparently,  as  was  also  the  case  in 
Germany,  not  only  the  individual  homesteads,  but  also  sev- 
eral situated  near  each  other,  were  surrounded  by  an  inclo- 
sure;  which  explains  the  reason  why  not  only  the  homestead, 
but  also  the  whole  village  was  called  '  tun.'  In  many  places — 
for  example  in  the  laws  of  Athelstan  II.  Fr.  §  2,  where  an 
expiatory  fine  is  to  be  divided  among  the  poor;  as  well  as  in 
Edgar  IV.  c.  8 — the  word  'tun'  cannot  be  intended  to  be 
used  for  individual  homesteads,  but  only  for  places,  a  signifi- 
cation which  later  became  the  ruling  one."  Nasse,  in  a  foot- 
note, 3,  |)age  16,  says,  "the  old  Jute  law  prescribes  (from 
1240  A.  D.)  iii,  chap.  57,  van  tinmen  tho  makencle  (on  making 
hedges)  'that  every  village  shall  be  inclosed  by  a  hed»'-e,' 
and  gives  detailed  rules  for  the  duty  of  every  villager  to  put 
up  his  part  of  the  common  fence  which  enclosed  the  whole 
village  as  well  as  single  farmsteads." 


82  The  Germanic  Origin  of 

A  cliaptor  might  be  written  upon  the  survival  in  New 
England  of  this  ancient  institution  known  as  the  "  Common 
Fence."  The  local  records  of  every  old  New  England  Town 
are  lull  of  such  references.  Take  the  following  from  the  MS. 
Kecords  of  Hatfield  Side,  January  14,  1660:  "Agreed  and 
vottnl  at  a  side  meeting  [another  case  of  Old  English  survival !] 
that  there  shall  he  a  common  fence  made  from  Goodman 
Fellows  to  the  landing  place,  every  man  fencing  the  end  of 
liis  lot,  and  Isaac  Graves  to  fence  his  part  next  to  Goodman 
Bool's  meadow  lot,  the  rest  to  be  done  in  common."  May 
11,  1663,  "Agreed  at  a  side  meeting  that  every  man  shall  set 
down  a  stake  with  the  two  first  letters  of  his  name  by  every 
parcel  of  fence  by  the  13th  of  this  month."  It  would  be 
diilicult  to  say  which  is  the  more  curious,  the  survival  of  "  old 
Jute  law,"  or  this  revival  of  old  English  usage.  It  has  taken 
some  time  for  hedgerows  to  find  root  again  in  New  England, 
but  Haywards,  (not  from  hay,  but  from  the  Saxon  Hege, 
wardens  of  the  hedges,)  Fence  Viewers  and  Field  Drivers, 
were  offices  that  our  ancestors  had  probably  filled  in  the  old 
country,  and  they  revived  them  here  at  once.  Hatfield  Side 
vote<l,  May  7,  1662,  "that  the  South  Meadow  should  be 
cleared  of  cattle  and  Horses  by  Friday  next,  any  cattle  with- 
out Keeper,  or  with  keeper  on  mowing  ground  shall  pay  1 
shilling  each  to  him  that  brings  them  to  the  pound  and  4 
pence  to  the  Pound  Keeper."  The  Village  Pound,  which 
Sir  Henry  Maine  *  says  is  probably  older  than  the  Kingdom, 
was  instituted  at  Hatfield  before  the  Church,  before  the  Town 
itself,  when  Hatfield  was  not  yet  a  Parish  of  Hadley.  This 
Him|)le  enclosure,  the  Cattle  Tun,  represents  a  communal  idea 
which  was  growing  in  that  little  hamlet  on  the  west  side  of 
the   Connecticut   river.       Already    while   only    the   Pound, 


♦Main*!,  Early  History  of  Institutions,  263.  He  says,  "there  is  no 
more  unci<;nt  institution  in  the  country  than  the  Village  Pound ;  it  is 
old^r  than  the  King's  Bench  and  probably  older  than  the  kingdom." 
The  name  "  Pound  ''  is  derived  from  the  Baxon  pyndan,  to  pen  or  enclose. 


New  England  Towns.  33 

Common  Meadows  and  Fences  occupied  the  village  mind  it 
was  voted  "at  side  meeting  that  when  there  is  a  meeting 
legally  warned,  whoever  shall  not  come  shall  forfeit  1  shil- 
ling, whoever  shall  come  a  half  hour  late,  6  j)ence,  whoever 
shall  depart  before  the  close,  G  pence."  Verily  here  was  a 
budding  Tun  within  a  Town. 

The  most  striking  indication  of  historic  connection  between 
the  village  communities  of  New  Eny;land  and  those  of  the 
Old  World  lies  in  the  sovereignty  of  the  people,  particularly 
in  its  agrarian  laws. 

Plymouth  was  not  settled  upon  the  principle  of  squatter 
sovereignty — every  man  for  himself,  but  upon  communal 
principles  of  the  strictest  character.  These  were  not  adoj)ted 
simply  because  of  the  co-partnership  of  the  Pilgrims  with 
London  merchants  or  chiefly  through  the  influence  of  a  spirit 
of  Christian  communism,  though  doubtless  both  of  these 
motives  had  considerable  weight  in  the  early  management  of 
the  colony.  There  are  features  of  communal  administration 
in  the  matter  of  landed  property  too  peculiar  and  too  closely 
resembling  those  elsewhere  considered,  in  the  case  of  the 
historical  village  community,  to  permit  of  any  other  satisfac- 
tory explanation  than  that  of  inherited  Saxon  customs.  Land 
community  was  maintained  too  long  at  Plymouth  and  in  the 
towns  which  were  planted  around  Plymouth  on  the  same 
communal  principles,  to  be  accounted  for  on  any  theory  of  a 
temporary  partnership  of  seven  years  or  on  religious  grounds. 

Vestiges  of  the  old  Germanic  system  of  common  fields  are 
to  be  found  in  almost  every  ancient  town  in  New  England. 
In  the  town  of  Plymouth  there  are  to  this  day  some  two 
hundred  acres  of  Commons  known  as  Town  Lands.  This  tract 
is  largely  forest,  where  villagers  sometimes  help  themselves 
to  fuel  in  good  old  Teutonic  fashion.  In  studying  the  terri- 
torial history  of  the  Plymouth  plantation,  I  have  gathered 
many  interesting  materials  concerning  the  perpetuation  of 
land  community  in  that  region.  It  is  impossible  in  this  con- 
nection to  enter  into  details.  One  or  two  concrete  facts  like 
5 


34  The  Germanic  Origin  of 

the  followin?  will  illustrate  the  survival  of  land  communitj 
ill  the  reuMon  of  Plymouth  colony. 

In  the  old  town  of  Sandwich,  upon  Cape  Cod,  at  the 
noint  where  tiie  ship  canal  was  projected  in  1880,  there  is  a 
little  parcel  of  land  of  130  acres  known  as  the  Town  Neck. 
Tliis  is  owned  by  a  company  of  twenty-four  proprietors,  the 
descendants  or  heirs  of  the  first  settlers  of  the  town,  and  this 
tract  is  managed  to  this  day  as  a  common  field.  Originally  the 
Town  Xcck,  with  other  common  lands,  belonged  to  the  whole 
town.  In  the  MS.  Town  Kecords  of  Sandwich  I  find,  under 
the  date  May  22,  1658,  this  vote:  "If  any  inhabytant  want- 
eth  land  to  plant,  hee  may  have  some  in  the  Towne  Neck,  or 
in  the  Common  for  six  yeare  and  noc  longer."  Later  in  1678, 
April  6,  townsmen  are  given  liberty  to  improve  Neck  Lauds 
"  noe  longer  than  ten  yeares,  .  .  .  and  then  to  be  at  the 
townsmen's  ordering  againe."  In  the  year  1695,  the  use  of 
the  Town  Neck  was  restricted  to  the  heirs  of  original  proprie- 
tors, and  the  land  was  staked  out  into  thirty-eight  lots.  The 
lots  were  not  fenced  otf,  and  the  whole  tract  continued  to  lie 
as  a  common  field,  under  the  authority  of  the  entire  body  of 
j)roprietors,  like  the  arable  lands  of  a  German  village  com- 
munity. In  1696,  April  4,  it  was  agreed  that  the  Town 
Neck  should  be  improved  for  the  future  by  planting  and 
sowing  as  a  common  field,  until  the  major  part  of  those  inter- 
ested should  see  cause  otherwise  to  dispose  or  improve  the 
same.  The  common  fence  was  to  be  made  up  and  a  gate  to 
be  provided  by  the  1st  of  May.  A  field-driver  or  hayward 
was  to  keep  the  Town  Neck  clear  of  creatures  and  to  impound 
for  tresjjass.  In  1700  it  was  voted  that  the  Neck  be  cleared 
of  creatures  by  the  16th  of  April,  and  that  no  part  of  the  land 
be  improved  for  tillage  other  than  by  sowing. 

And  thus  from  the  latter  half  of  the  seventeenth  century 
down  to  the  present  day  have  the  proprietors  of  Sandwich 
Town  Neck  regulated  the  use  of  this  old  common  field. 
Evf-ry  year  they  iiave  met  together  in  the  springtime  to  deter- 
mine when  the  fences  should  be  set  up  and  how  the  pasture 


New  England  Towns.  35 

sliould  be  stinted.     Tlie  old  Commoners'  Records  are  for  tlie 
most  part  still  in  existence  as  far  hack  as  the  year  1G93,  and 
before  this  time  the  Town  Records  are  lull  of  agrarian  legis- 
lation, for  the  Town   Neck  was  then  virtually  town  property. 
There  arose  in  Sandwich  and  in  every  New  England  village 
community  the  same  strife   between  old  residents  and  new 
comers  as  that  between  the  patricians  and  plebeians  of  ancient 
Rome;  the  old  settlers  claimed  a  monopoly  of  the  public  land 
and  the  new  comers  demanded  a  share.     In  most  old  New  ' 
England  towns,  the  heirs  of  original  settlers  or  of  citizens 
living  in  the  community  at  a  specified  date  retained  a  mon- 
opoly of  the  common  lan<ls  for  many  years  until  finally  com- 
])elled  by  force  or  public  opinion  to  cede  their  claims  to  the 
town.     In  Sandwich,  however,  a  vestige  of  the  old  system 
has  survived  to  this  day.     Every  spring,  for  many  years,  has 
appeared  a  public  notice  (I  last  saw  one  in  the  Seaside  Fress, 
May  8,  1880)  calling  together  the  proprietors  of  the  Town 
Neck  at  some  store  in  the  village,  to  choose  a  moderator  and 
a  clerk,  and  to  regulate  the  letting  of  cow  rights  for  the  ensu- 
ing year.     I  came  on  the  track  of  this  curious  old  common 
field  one  summer   vacation   in   Provincetown,  at  the  land's 
end  of  Cape  Cod,  where  also  and  at  Truro  I  found  some 
interesting:  bits  of  fossil  land  tenure.     I  met  in  Provincetown 
a  man  who  said  he  was  taxed  for  one-sixth  of  a  cow  right  in 
Sandwich,  which  he  had  inherited  from  his  grandfather.     I 
knew  that  a  cow  right  meant  a  vestige  of  common  pasture  and 
so  investigated  the  matter.     In  Sandwich  I  found   the  old 
Commoners'  records  extending  back  for  nearly  two  centuries, 
in  the  possession  of  a  farmer  in   whose  family  the  clerkship 
had  been  for  several  generations.     He  said  nobody  had  ever 
asked  to  see  those  records  before,  and  with  Arcadian  simplicity 
allowed   me  to  take  the  whole  collection   to  my  hotel   for 
examination.     I  created  quite  an  excitement  in  the  place  by 
reason  of  my  inquiries,  for  it  happened  that  just  about  that 
time  the  Ship  Canal  was  under  discussion  in  Sandwich,  and 
the  villagers  concluded  that  I  was  examining:  into  the  title  of 


36  The  Germanic  Origin  of 

the  proprietors  to  the  Town  Xeck  with  a  view  to  land  specu- 
lation. 

In  the  town  of  Salem  also  I  liave  discovered  very  inter- 
esting snrvivals  of  the  old  English  system  of  common  fields. 
Originallv,  the  whole  region  round  about  the  first  settlement 
was  common  land.  The  region  of  North  Danvers  and  of  the 
town  of  Ptabody  was  once  a  part  of  Salem's  communal 
domain.  Winter  Island  long  was,  and  Salem  Neck  still  is, 
more  or  less  common  land.  The  outlying  portions  of  Salem 
were  gradually  granted  out  to  individuals  with  important 
reservations  by  the  town  in  the  interest  of  parish  churches, 
for  the  poor  and  for  the  encouragement  of  certain  public 
works,  like  the  manufacture  of  glass,  which  was  very  early 
attempted  by  the  thrifty  Puritans  as  a  business  enterj)rise, 
like  tile  manufacture  of  New  England  rum,  although  with 
less  profit.  There  were  for  many  years  in  the  town  of  Salem 
certain  common  fields  owned  by  associated  proprietors  just  as 
in  the  case  of  the  Sandwich  Town  Neck.  Such  were  the 
North  and  South  Fields  in  Salem.  The  old  Commoners' 
records  of  the  South  Field  are  still  preserved  in  the  library  of 
the  Essex  Institute,  and  date  back  as  far  as  1680.  Under  the 
date  of  October  14  of  that  year,  I  find  the  following:  Voted, 
that  the  proprietors  have  liberty  to  put  in  cattle  for  herbage 
— that  is  to  say,  6  cows,  4  oxen,  3  horses  or  yearlings,  or  24 
calves,  to  10  acres  of  land,  and  so  in  proportion  to  greater  or 
lesser  quantities  of  land ;  and  no  person  shall  cut  or  strip 
their  Indian  corn  stalks  after  they  have  gathered  their  corn, 
on  penalty  of  forfeiting  herbage."  These  old  common  fields 
have  long  since  disappeared,  for  they  are  now  built  over  by 
the  city  of  Salem ;  but  there  still  survives,  at  a  little  distance 
from  the  heart  of  the  town,  an  example  of  the  same  sort  of 
land  tenure  upon  quite  a  large  scale.  The  so-called  Great 
Pastures  of  Salem,  some  three  hundred  acres,  are,  to  this  day, 
owned  and  managed  by  a  small  company  of  proprietors  in 
common,  of  whom  Dr.  Wheatland,  of  the  Essex  Institute,  has 
been,  for  many  years,  the  clerk.     He  has  in  his  possession  the 


New  England  Towns.  37 

records  of  tlie  proprietary,  extending;  back  for  many  genera- 
tions. These  records  are  full  of  old  time  regidations  in  regard 
to  common  fencing,  common  pasturage,  cow  commons,  sheep 
commons,  and  the  like.  The  votes  are  niucli  the  same  from 
year  to  year.  We  can  hardly  expect  much  variety  in  the 
administration  of  common  fields  during  the  short  period  of 
Kew  England  history  since  the  system  endured  for  so  many 
centuries  in  Europe  without  any  aj)precial)le  modification.* 

The  life  jmnciple  enduring  in  these  apparently  dead  forms 
of  land  tenure  is  the  sovereignty  of  the  community  over  its 
individual  or  associate  members.  Although  inheriting  defi- 
nite rights  in  the  common  land,  shareholders  are  sul)jc'ct  to 
the  will  of  the  majority.  Communal  sovereignty  over  lands 
exists  even  where  individual  landed  rights  appear  most  abso- 
lute. Tlie  other  day  a  newspaper  scrap  was  sent  me  from  the 
South  concerning  a  Mississippi  planter  who  wanted  to  turn 
his  plantation  into  a  stock  farm.  His  neighbors  who  were  in 
the  habit  of  planting  cotton  remonstrated  and  carried  the  case 
into  ])ublic  court,  praying  for  an  injunction  to  prevent  the 
man  from  sowing  grass  seed,  on  the  ground  that  the  grass 
would  spread  over  adjoining  [)lantations  and  unfit  them  for 
raising  cotton.  The  injunction  was  granted  by  the  court  and 
illustrates  how,  in  a  quarter  of  our  country  where  individu- 
alism is  supposed  to  be  most  rampant,  the  sovereignty  of  the 
community  over  land  is  recognized  by  law,  even  in  the  matter 
of  what  farmers  plant. 

Traces  of  the  old  system  of  agrarian  community  are  crop- 
])ing  out  in  many  different  States  of  the  American  Union, 
which  itself  is  based,  as  a  j)ernianent  and  necessary  institu- 
tion, upon  the  idea  of  territorial  commonwealth,  with  self 
governing  States  gradually  organized   out  of  the  Common 

*The  village  community  of  early  Salem  is  one  of  the  most  remarkable 
cases  of  historic  survival  in  New  England.  An  attempt  to  point  out 
some  of  the  most  striking  features  of  that  old  plantation  has  l»een  made  in 
a  monograph  upon  "Cape  Ann  and  Salem  Plantations,"  now  in  press  at 
the  Essex  Institute,  and  to  he  ri'|iublished  in  this  University  series. 


38         The  Germanic  Origin  of  New  England  Towns,       -. 

Laiul  of  the  nation,  *  as  New  England  Towns  were  organized 
out  of  village  folk-land.  Wherever  in  this  common  Saxon 
land  the  student  may  care  to  institute  researches  into  the 
beginnings  of  civic  life,  there  he  will  find,  if  he  digs  deeply 
enough,  the  old  Saxon  principle  of  land  community  uniting 
men  together  upon  a  common  basis  and  around  a  common 
centre.  Whether  that  centre  be  the  Town  Commons  of  the 
North  or  the  Court  Greens  of  the  South,  the  Common  Pas- 
tures of  Massachusetts  or  the  Common  Pastures  of  South 
Carolina;  the  Iblk-land  of  a  ville,  parish,  township,  state,  or 
nation, — it  is  after  all  much  the  same  in  principle,  for  these 
communal  interests  are  all  derived  from  a  common  Saxon 
source.  There  is  much  to  learn  by  a  study  of  the  local 
beginnings,  agrarian  and  economic,  of  these  United  States. 
There  is  surely  a  common  country  of  historic  worth  yet  to  be 
discovered,  for  mere  surface  mining,  here  and  there,  in  vari- 
ous quarters,  indicates  a  vast  and  wide-reaching  common- 
wealth below.  It  is  the  commonwealth  of  law  and  custom,  of 
race  and  kinship,  historic  mines  that  can  never  be  exhausted, 
for  they  extend  not  only  underneath  all  imaginary  sections 
of  our  land,  but  under  the  dividing  sea  of  Revolutionary 
History  itself,  uniting  the  New  World  inseparably  to  the 
Old. 


*  Maryland's  influence  in  founding  a  National  Commonwealth,  Fund 
Pubiicatioa  No.  11,  Maryland  Historical  Society,  1877.  By  H.  B.  Adams. 
In  this  monograph  there  is  evidence  showing  not  only  that  the  in- 
fluence of  Maryland  predominated  in  securing  the  great  land  cessions 
to  the  United  States,  hut  that  the  common  relation  of  the  English  Colo- 
nies in  America  to  these  western  lands,  won  by  the  blood  and  treasure  of 
all,  was  in  itself  a  most  substantial  ground  for  permanent  and  necessary 
Union.  After  the  Kevolution,  the  loosely  confederated  States  would  have 
broken  apart  if  it  had  not  been  for  their  common  interest  in  the  western 
territory  as  a  poten^tial  means  of  paying  ofl'  State  debts  and  rewarding 
soldter-vetcrans.  Moreover  the  great  West  atForded  field  for  republican 
expansion  upon  necessarily  federal  principles. 


COOPERATION  IN  UNIVERSITY  WORk'."^ 

(^ C^      •!♦*    TuK    Editor. 

[These  explanatory  remarks  were  made  November  17,  18S2,  before  the  Ilistorieal  and 
Political  Science  AssociiUioii  of  the  Jobns  Hopkins  University  for  the  sake  of  developing 
still  further,  on  the  part  of  its  members,  that  cooperative  spirit  which  is  the  motive  power 
of  this  University  Series.— ii.  u.  a.] 

The  need  of  some  channel  for  the  systematic  publication  of  Johns 
Hopkins  University  Studies  in  Historical  and  Political  Science, 
gave  rise  to  the  idea  of  a  series  of  monographs,  each  complete  in 
itself,  but  all  contributing  toward  a  common  end, — the  development 
of  American  Institutional  and  American  Economic  History.  The 
idea  of  a  serial  publication  of  numbered  monographs,  one  paper 
sustaining  another^  was  already  current  in  Holtzendorff's  Deutsche 
Zeit  und  Streit  Fragen  ;  in  Virchow's  and  Holtzendorff's  Samm- 
lung  gemeinverstandlicher  wissenschaftlicher  Vortrage;  in  Con- 
rad's Sammlung  nationalokonomischer  und  statistischer  Abhand- 
lungen  des  staatswissenschaftlichen  Seminars  zu  Halle;  and  in 
Schmoller's  Staats-  und  socialwissenschaftliche  Forschungen.  But 
the  special  impulse  to  this  University  Series  was  the  Giessener 
Studien  auf  dem  Gebiet  der  Geschichte,  instituted  in  1881  by 
Wilhelm  Oiickcn,  editor  of  the  Monograph-History  of  the  World, 
(Allgemeine  Geschichte  der  Welt  in  Einzeldarstellungen,)  a  serial 
work  which  has  been  in  progress  since  1878,  through  the  coopera- 
tion of  historical  specialists,  a  work  which  has  an  earlier  parallel 
in  the  political  tield  in  Bluntschli's  Staatsworterbuch  (1857),  and 
a  later  parallel  in  the  economic  field  in  Schoenberg's  Handbuch 
des  politischen  Oekononomie  (1882),  both  composed  by  special- 
ists upon  the  sound  economic  principles  of  division  of  labor  and 
scientific  cooperation. 

The  impulse  received,  in  the  first  instance,  fi'om  Germany  was 
strengthened  by  a  knowledge  of  the  efficient  workings  of  the 
cooperative  method  of  writing  municipal  and  national  history  in 


/6^A^^<,^t/^-€'--^  V      t:-^    ~  d^ -^    <J    .«i  ^^  »-X-OfTA^  cX^^M.^^ 


40  Cooperation  in  University  Worh. 

America,  under  the  direction  of  Professor  Justin  Winsor  of  Har- 
vard University ;  also  by  observation  of  the  cooperative  method 
in  the  conduct  of  the  American  Journals  of  Mathematics,  Phi- 
lology, Clieraistry,  tlie  Studies  from  the  Biological  Laboratory, 
and  the  Journal  of  Physiology,  the  latter  edited  by  an  English 
scholar  with  the  cooperation  of  English  and  American  special- 
ists, but  published  in  this  country  under  the  auspices  of  the 
Johns  Hopkins  University;  still  further  by  acquaintance  with, 
the  Peabody  Fund  Publications  of  the  Maryland  Historical  So- 
ciety; and  by  practical  suggestions  from  Mr.  Sidney  S.  Rider, 
publisher  of  the  Rhode  Island  Historical  Tracts. 

The  idea  of  studying  American  Institutional  and  American 
Economic  History,  upon  cooperative  principles,  beginning  with 
local  institutions,  and  extending  ultimately  to  national  institu- 
tions, developed  gradually  from  an  interest  in  municipal  history, 
first  awakened  in  the  Seminary  of  Professor  Erdmannsdoerffer  at 
the  University  of  Heidelberg,  where,  in  1875,  while  reading  the 
Gesta  Friderici  Imperatoris,  by  Otto  of  Freising,  seminary-dis- 
cussion turned  upon  the  Communes  of  Lombardy  and  the  question 
of  the  Roman  or  Germanic  origin  of  city  government  in  mediaeval 
Italy.  This  awakened  interest,  quickened  by  the  reading  of  Carl 
Hegel,  Arnold,  Von  Maurer,  Fustel  de  Coulanges,  was  ultimately 
directed  toward  England  and  New  England  by  a  suggestion  upon 
the  last  page  of  Sir  Henry  Maine's  Village  Communities,  where, 
quoting  Palfrey's  History  of  New  England  (ii,  13,  14)  and  certain 
remarks  in  The  Nation  (No.  273)*  upon  the  passage  by  Professor 
William  F.  Allen  of  the  University  of  Wisconsin,  Sir  Henry  calls 
attention  to  the  survival  of  Village  Communities  in  America. 
This  suggestive  idea,  verified  in  all  essential  details  with  reference 
to  Nantucket,  Plymouth  Plantations,  Cape  Anne,  Salem  and  the 
oldest  towns  in  New  England,  has  been  extended  gradually  to  a 


♦Professor  Allen's  communication  was  published  in  The  Nation,  Sep- 
tember 22,  1870,  us  a  "  Note  "  upon  Maine's  "Ancient  Law,"  before  his 
"  Village  Communities  "  appeared  (1871).  Professor  W.  F.  Allen  was 
the  first  to  verify  Sir  Henry  Maine's  agrarian  theory  in  America  by  inde- 
jiendent  research  in  the  island  of  Nantucket,  a  study  published  in  The 
Nation,  January  10, 1878,  under  the  title,  "A  Survival  of  Land  Community 
in  New  England.''     Cf.  Nation,  Nov.  10,  1881. 


Cooperation  in  University  Work.  41 

cooperative  study  of  AiiK'riciui  local  institutions  in  all  the  older 
States  and  tlirouglioui  tiie  North-west,  where,  in  Wisconsin,  Pro- 
fessor Allen,  the  original  pioneer,  has  joined  in  the  work,  sup- 
ported by  his  Seminary  of  advanced  students.  The  idea  is 
represented  in  the  distant  University  of  Nebraska,  at  Lincoln,  by 
Professor  George  E.  Howard,  who,  trained  at  German  Universi- 
ties, is  this  year  teaching  "  Institutional  History  "  by  the  compara- 
tive method,  with  Maine,  Hearn,  Laveleye,  Fustel  de  Coulanges, 
and  Lewis  H.  Morgan  for  suggestive  guides. 

It  is  interesting  to  see  the  knowledge  of  Aryan  institutions  thus 
advancing  westward.  The  science  of  English  Institutional  History 
is  represented  in  the  University  of  California  by  All)ert  S.  Cook, 
the  newly  appointed  Professor  of  English,  who,  while  Associate 
at  the  Johns  Hopkins  University,  cooperated  most  efficiently  with 
the  Historical  Seminary  in  teaching  its  members  Anglo-Saxon 
and  in  publishing  for  their  use  "Extracts  from  the  Anglo-Saxon 
Laws"  (Henry  Holt,  1880),  illustrating  the  early  "institutions 
and  manners  of  the  English  people."  This  work  was  the  direct 
outgrowth  of  Seminary  needs,  for  Stubbs'  Select  Charters  con- 
tained but  few  extracts  from  Anglo-Saxon  Law  and  these  only  in 
the  English  translation  by  Thorpe.  Mr.  Cook's  edition  was  made 
very  serviceable  to  students  by  constant  reference  to  Stubbs'  Con- 
stitutional History  and  to  the  Essays  in  Anglo-Saxon  Law  by 
Professor  Henry  Adams,  formerly  of  Harvard  College,  and  by 
his  pupils,  Henry  Cabot  Lodge,  Ernest  Young,  and  J.  Laurence 
Laughlin,  who,  advancing  from  German  and  English  ground,  were 
among  the  flrst  to  give  a  decided  impetus  to  the  study  of  historical 
jurisprudence  in  America. 

The  career  of  Mr.  Cook  well  illustrates  the  way  in  which  mod- 
ern science  is  conveyed  in  personal  forms  from  one  country  or  one 
University-centre  to  another.  Graduating  from  Rutgers  College 
in  1872,  he  taught  and  studied  for  a  *ew  years  in  this  country, 
and  then  went  to  Goettingen,  afterward  to  Leipzig.  In  1879  he 
was  called  to  Baltimore  to  teach  Early  English,  of  which  in 
America  and  in  Germany  he  had  made  a  specialty.  In  18Sl  he 
went  to  England  to  study  with  Professor  Sweet,  then  back  again 
to  Germany,  where,  at  Jena,  in  the  summer  of  1882  he  took  his 
Doctor  of  i'hilosophy,  with  a  thesis  on  the  Northumbrian  Dialect, 
approved  by  Professor  Sievers.  it  is  probable  that  his  previous 
6 


42  Cooperation  in  University  Worh. 

Uuiversity  connections  with  Baltimore,  together  with  other  infln- 
enccs  proceodin<r  from  English  and  German  experience,  had  some 
bearing  upon  his  immediate  call  to  a  professorship  in  the  Univer- 
sity of  California.  Thus  from  the  region  of  Saxe-Weimar,  or  as 
Freeman  savs,  "that  make-believe  Saxony  which  is  really  Sla- 
vonic," a  knowledge  of  Early  English  was  borne  across  real  Saxon 
land,  across  the  Ocean,  across  a  Continent,  to  the  most  western 
home  of  the  English  people,  a  home  which  Charles  Kingsley 
called  "a  New  World  beyond  a  New  World."  Saxon  Studies, 
like  Saxon  Conquests,  have  pushed  westward  as  well  as  eastward, 
beyond  Old  Saxon  and  Old  English  frontiers.  It  is  interesting 
to  see  scientific  3Iarkgrafen,  like  Cook  and  Sievers,  stationed 
upon  the  modern  borders.  "  What  Saxon  is  Cook  studying  at 
Jena?  Why  go  so  far?"  writes  Freeman.  "They  talk  a  fine 
West-Saxon  in  Virginia,*  with  their  ea  and  eo  well  turned  ont, 
almost  as  on  Sumorsaeian,  only  on  Sumorsaetan  they  distinguish 


*  Mr.  Freeman  knows  Virginian  in  only  one  of  its  varieties.  Tide- 
water, Piedmont,  Valley,  Southwest  all  present  marked  diflFerences.  The 
"  Tuckahoe  "  is  bewrayed  by  his  speech  as  soon  as  be  crosses  the  Blue 
Rido-e.  The  broad  a,  in  a  host  of  words,  in  which  it  is  unknown  to  the 
dictionaries,  belongs  to  the  older  settlements  and  persists  in  certain 
primitives  even  after  they  have  been  transplanted  to  the  foot  of  the 
mountains.  The  first  a  in  Chamberlayne  is  pronounced  in  three  or  four 
different  ways,  all  Virginian  and  so  all  right.  The  notorious  slurring  of 
the  medial  r,  common  in  large  belts  of  English  speech,  is  observable 
everywhere  in  Virginia,  but  much  less  in  some  sections  than  in  others, 
and  the  volatilization  of  the  final  r  is  not  so  marked  in  the  Piedmont  as 
it  is  in  the  Tide-water  section,  while  the  Lower  Valley  has  a  guttural  r 
final,  due  to  German  influence.  Scotch-Irish  has  told  on  the  dialect  of  the 
Upper  Valley  and  the  Southwest.  Clipping  of  final  consonants  is  noto- 
riously Scotch,  and  easy  theorists  have  exaggerated  the  African  influence. 
But  this  is  not  a  subject  for  any  one  except  a  trained  and  unprejudiced 
observer.  Almost  everybody  notices  differences  of  pronunciation,  but 
verv  few  can  register  them  with  precision  and  reproduce  them  with  accu- 
racy. It  is  high  time  that  linguistic  students  should  enter  upon  this  field 
of  research  before  the  outlying  districts  of  the  South  are  brought  into  the 
quicker  life  of  the  other  States.  The  Southern  shibboleths  will  in  time  be 
h).*t,  and  I  have  myself  heard  from  Southern  lips  such  pronunciations  as 
"  Noo-Var/;,"  ^'Toosday,"  and  "  dooty,^^  which  used  to  wound  the  Southern 
far  altnost  as  much  as  the  gasping  of  the  Cockney,  which  we  call  "  drop- 
ping the  A." — B.  L.  Q. 


Cooperation  in  University  Work.  43 

janua*  and  dama  which  on  Magdflande  sound  alike."  But  it 
takes  a  VVest-Saxun  tiius  to  reco^Miize  West-Saxon.  Old  Enjr- 
land  explains  New  Kngland.  Schlcswig  and  Switzerland  reveal 
Early  England  to  the  English  historian.  A  knowledge  of  Old 
World  science  is  absolutely  indispensable  to  scientific  discov- 
ery ill  the  New  World.  The  local  dialects  of  America  can 
never  be  studied  with  an  understanding  mind  until  American 
students  study  the  local  dialects  of  England,  as  Dr.  Cook  has 
studied  the  Northmiibrian  dialect.  There  is,  perhaps,  a  certain 
historic  tilness  in  the  fact  that  Old  English  is  so  well  taught  in 
Germany,  the  oldest  of  the  three  homes  of  the  English  people ; 
and  it  is  surely  very  natural  that  Saxon  studies  should  traverse 
and  re-traverse  the  old  lines  of  Teutonic  migration. 

There  is  nothing  in  the  wandering  of  peoples  or  in  the  history 
of  the  Erranles  Scbolares  of  the  Middle  Ages  which  rivals  the 
migrations  of  the  modern  scholar.  In  1875,  the  year  President 
Oilman  came  eastward  to  Baltimore  frinn  the  University  of  Cali- 
fornia, whither  he  had  been  called  in  1872  from  a  professorship 
in  Yale  College,  a  student  who  that  year  graduated  from  Berkeley 
came  eastward  by  the  advice  of  his  teachers  and  wandered,  like  a 
veritable /a/}  re/jrff^r  Schdler,  from  one  institution  to  another  until 
he  reached  the  University  of  Leipzig,  upon  the  historic  border 
between  the  Teuton  and  the  Slave.  At  the  same  time,  the  newly 
appointed  President  of  the  Johns  Hopkins  University  was  wan- 
dering over  Europe,  visiting  the  chief  educational  institutions  of 


♦Readers  who  happen  not  to  he  familiar  with  the  peculiar  pronunciation 
of  Piedmont  VirsiiniH  [Magdsland),  and  who  therefore  fail  to  apprehend 
Mr.  Freeman's  allii.*ion,  may  now  enjoy  what  the  President  of  the  Del- 
phian Club  thought  the  crowning  felicity  of  human  existence — "a  joke 
■well  explained."  In  the  region  referred  to,  the  final  r  is  usually  silent; 
and  thus  doo7-  {jnnua)  and  doe  [dama)  are  pronounced  exactly  alike.  The 
writer  remembers  to  have  met  with  an  indigenous  ballad,  set  to  music, 
and  much  in  favor  with  the  fair  sex.  in  which  "  store,"  "  sure,"  and  "  so  " 
were  made  to  rhyme  with  each  other.  It  represented  the  reasonable  irri- 
tation of  a  maiden  at  the  timidity  of  a  bashful  lover,  who  could  not  screw 
his  courage  to  the  proposing-point ;  and  in  one  stanza  she  complains: 

"I  know  his  love  is  constant, 
Atl'iMtionate  and  pure:  [iivd] 
What  ails  the  bashful  fellow 
That  he  cauuol  toll  uie.so?"  — '^V.  U.  n. 


44  Cooperation  in  University  Work. 

Germany,  France,  and  England,  with  a  view  to  the  transmigration 
of  ideas  from  the  Old  World  to  the  New.  In  1876  the  American 
student,  quickened  by  European  travel  and  experience,  returned 
to  his  native  land  to  enter  upon  a  philosophical  Fellowship  at  the 
new  University,  the  President  of  which  had  been  inaugurated  in 
the  Monumental  City  on  the  22nd  of  February  of  that  year.  The 
University,  like  the  ideas  of  its  President  and  like  the  culture  of 
the  returning  student,  was  neither  German  nor  French  nor  English, 
but  American  and  cosmopolitan.  This  country  and  all  its  insti- 
tutions, though  they  adopt  the  best  which  the  Old  World  can 
teach,  will  constitute  a  New  World  still  by  natural  selection,  and 
by  independent  organization  in  harmony  with  a  new  environment. 
The  California'student,  who  had  been  schooled  in  German  Uni- 
versities for  one  year,  studied  for  two  more  years  at  the  Johns 
Hopkins  University  and  then  took  his  degree  of  Doctor  of  Phi- 
losophy, with  this  significant  thesis,  "The  Interdependence  of  the 
Principles  of  Human  Knowledge."  He  was  then  called  across 
the  Continent,  to  his  Alma  Mater,  to  become  an  Assistant  Pro- 
fessor in  literature  and  philosophy.  From  that  frontier-post,  his 
contributions  to  the  Californian,  the  Berkeley  Quarterly,  and 
the  Journal  of  Speculative  Philosophy  came  migrating  east- 
ward. "Miud-stuif"  and  other  "Realities"  pushed  across  the 
sea,  marched  into  England  from  the  West,  and  effected  a  certain 
intellectual  conquest  in  self  restricted  Saxon  ways  by  publication 
in  a  very  special  philosophical  journal  known  as"T/j«  3Iind," 
(July,  1881 ;  Jan.,  1882).  And  now  Dr.  Royce  himself  has  again 
migrated  eastward,  having  been  invited  to  a  position  as  lecturer 
upon  Philosophy  in  Harvard  College,  as  substitute  for  Professor 
James,  who  has  again  wandered  to  Europe. 

At  the  same  time  Dr.  Royce  was  returning  eastward.  Dr. 
Stringhara,  a  graduate  of  Harvard  College  and  afterward  a 
Fellow  of  the  Johns  Hopkins  University,  then  travelling  Fellow 
of  Harvard,  was  returning  westward  from  the  University  of 
Leipzig  to  his  old  home  in  Kansas,  to  push  on  thence  to  his  new 
western  home  in  the  University  of  California,  where  he  has  ac- 
cepted a  professorship  in  Mathematics.  And  now  a  student  from 
California,  bearing  letters  from  the  faculty  of  the  institution  at 
Berkeley,  has  come  eastward  to  Baltimore,  leaving  an  associate 
editorship  of  the  Saa  Francisco  Bulletin,  for  the  sake  of  discover- 


Coojjeradon  in  University  Work.  45 

inf^,  for  himself,  an  old  worM  of  science.  Aud  already  in  the 
liglit  of  Institutional  studies  he  is  investigating  the  municii)al 
history  of  St.  Louis,  and  is  preparing  to  develop  a  veritable  mine 
in  the  study  of  frontier  law  and  of  the  wonderful  evolution  of 
self-government  in  California  mining-camps,  where  old  Saxon 
forms  of  associated  families  of  men  sprang  full  armed  into  life 
and  law.  A  student  from  Professor  Howard's  Seminary  in 
Nebraska  has  also  come  eastward  to  continue  his  western  studies. 
He  represents,  moreover,  a  comity  of  scientific  associati<jns  first 
established  at  German  Universities  between  his  American  instruc- 
tors. And  with  the  student  from  Nebraska  comes  a  Regent  of 
the  Nebraska  University,  a  graduate  of  Amherst  College,  who, 
although  a  man  of  middle  age,  has  entered  the  same  Seminariura 
with  his  western  protege. 

Such  facts  illustnite  not  only  the  remarkable  migrations  of  the 
modern  scholar,  i)ut  that  curious  system  of  intercollegiate  exchange 
which  has  developed  so  rapidly  of  late  in  America.  Within  the 
space  of  the  last  six  years,  a  graduate  of  Harvard  College  has 
held  in  Baltimore  a  Johns  Hopkins  University  Fellowship,  one  of 
the  Harvard  "travelling"  Fellowships  at  Leipzig  and  Bonn,  a 
tutorship  at  Harvard,  a  professorship  at  Bowdoin  College,  and 
a  professorshij)  in  the  University  of  Virginia,  where  he,  a  New 
England  man,  succeeded  a  Virginian  who  had  been  called  north 
to  Columbia  College.  There  are  signs  of  a  new  era  in  the  educa- 
tional history  of  this  country.  A  graduate  student  from  South 
Carolina  comes  to  Baltimore  and,  through  association  with  a 
graduate  of  Brown  Univer.«ity,  obtains  the  Prinei})alship  of  a 
High  School  in  a  Connecticut  Town.  A  graduate  of  Columbia 
College  lectures  in  Baltimore  and  Ithaca.  A  graduate  of  Iowa 
College  in  1874,  afterwards  a  student  at  Andover  Theological 
Seminary,  held  a  Fellowship  in  Political  Science  for  two  years  in 
Baltimore,  took  his  degree  of  Ph.  D.,*  studieil  one  year  at  Heidel- 

*  Dr.  Henry  C.  Adam?'  graduating  thesis  for  the  Doctor's  dejijrpe  at  the 
Johns  Hopkins  University,  taken  in  1878  after  s])L'eial  examination  in 
History  by  Mr.  George  Bancroft  and  in  Political  Econoio}-  by  Professor 
Francis  A.  Walker,  was  published  in  the  Tiibingener  Zeitschrift  fiir  die 
gesammle  Staatswissenschaft,  1879,  under  the  title  Zur  Geschichle  der 
Eesteuerung  in  den  Vereinigten  Staaten  von  Anierika  in  der  Periode  von 
1789-1 81 G.  The  paper  should  be  republished  and  the  subject  continued 
in  America. 


40  Cooperation  in  University  Work. 

berjT  iiiuler  Knies  and  Bluntschli  and  at  Berlin  under  Wagner  and 
Eugel,  then,  after  his  return  to  America,  lectured  in  quick  succes- 
sion at  tiiree  different  institutions,  at  Michigan,  Cornell,  and  Johns 
Hopkins  Universities.  C.  R.  Laniuan,  a  Doctor  of  Philosophy 
from  Yale  College,  who  afterward  studied  two  years  in  Germany, 
advanced  in  fonr  years  from  a  Fellowship  and  an  Associateship 
in  the  Johns  Hopkins  to  a  professorship  in  Harvard  College. 
He  was  succeeded  by  a  former  pupil  in  Baltimore,  who,  born  in 
Austria,  migrated  to  America,  entered  the  University  of  Chicago, 
graduated  in  1877  at  Furman  College,  South  Carolina,  from  the 
instruction  of  Professor  Toy,  studied  under  Professor  Whitney  in 
New  Haven  one  year,  took  his  Ph.  D.  in  Baltimore  in  one  year 
more,  and  then  studied  a  year  longer  in  Germany  before  returning 
to  the  Johns  Hopkins.  A  Harvard  Lecturer  and  a  Michigan 
University  Professor  spend  half  their  time  in  Baltimore.  College 
training  and  professorial  experience  are  no  longer  local  and  pro- 
vincial. Stronger  currents  of  influence  are  already  arising:  col- 
legiate reciprocity,  the  exchange  of  thought,  methods,  and  men  ; 
university  education  in  the  Old  World  and  in  the  New;  special 
qualifications  for  special  work;  character  born  of  good  training 
at  home,  and  developed  by  school,  college,  university,  and  the 
world, — these  are  ideas  which  must  prevail. 

Among  the  most  encouraging  signs  of  the  times  are  the  cordial 
relations  subsisting  between  the  higher  institutions  of  learning, 
and  especially  in  that  growing  brotherhood  of  scholars  which  is 
to  be  found  in  every  real  University  centre.  At  the  Johns  Hopkins 
during  the  past  year  there  have  met,  upon  the  common  ground  of 
science,  representative  graduates  from  fifty-two  different  Colleges 
and  Universities,  students  from  twenty-one  different  States  of  the 
American  Union,  and  from  various  foreign  countries.  If  to  this 
record  shonld  be  added  a  full  account  of  the  various  College  and 
University connectionsthat,  at  onetimeoranother,have  been  enjoyed 
by  the  ninety-four  Fellows,  by  the  eighty-six  different  Instructors, 
Lecturers,  Associates,  and  Professors  who  have  been  connected 
with  the  Johns  Hopkins,  it  would  certainly  appear  that  the  leading 
institutions  of  Europe  and  America  had  met  in  Baltimore  by  rep- 
resentation. The  College  and  University  system  of  the  world 
would  appear  in  microcosm.  Without  special  knowledge  of  or 
inquiry  into  the  subject,  one  might  enumerate  the  following  Euro- 


Cooperation  in  Universify  Work.  47 

pean  centres  of  leariiiii,«,'  which  have  afforded  instruction  and 
scientific  traininj^,'  to  nieiuhers  of  the  Jolius  Hopiiins  University 
staff:  Oxford,  Cambridf,'e,  London,  Paris,  Berlin,  Vienna.  Leipzig, 
Munich,  Goettingen,  Tiibingen,  Heidelberg,  Strassburg.  and  other 
German  Universities,  the  round  of  two  or  three  of  which  is  always 
made  by  American  as  well  as  by  German  students.  Lecturers 
from  Oxford,  Cambridge,  the  University  of  London,  Freiburg  ira 
Breisgau,  Harvard,  Yale,  Brown,  Cornell,  Michigan,  Wisconsin, 
Virginia,  and  Tennessee  have  appeared  in  Baltimore.  More  than 
one  hundred  students  and  instructors  have  gone  forth  from  the 
Johns  Hopkins  University  to  lecture  or  teach  elsewhere.  Fifty 
different  institutions  of  collegiate  or  university  grade  have  had 
instructors  from  Baltimore. 

It  is  interesting  to  view  geographically  the  migration  of  influ- 
ence from  this  University  centre  into  the  South,  the  South-West, 
the  West,  across  the  Continent,  and  around  the  world.  The  Johns 
Hopkins  has  sent  professors  or  teachers  to  University  of  Virginia, 
University  of  North  Carolina,  two  Colleges  and  a  Theological 
Seminary  in  South  Carolina,  University  of  Louisiana,  Universities 
in  Tennessee  and  Kentucky,  three  Colleges  and  a  University  in 
Pennsylvania,  two  Colleges  and  a  University  in  Ohio,  University 
of  Michigan,  University  of  Wisconsin,  University  of  California, 
University  of  Tokio.  and  University  of  Bonn.  Baltimore  specialists 
have  continued  work  in  Universities  of  Vienna,  Berlin,  Leijtzig, 
Jena,  Munich,  Heidelberg,  Strassburg,  Bonn,  Goettingen,  Paris, 
London,  Oxford,  Camljridge,  and  Edinburgh.  Harvard  and  eight 
of  the  higher  institutions  of  learning  in  New  England,  (including 
those  at  Amherst,  Northampton,  and  Williamstown),  Cornell, 
Princeton,  Western  Maryland  College,  and  various  institutions  in 
the  City  of  Baltimore,  have  seen  fit  to  employ  the  services  of 
Johns  Hopkins  men  as  lecturers  or  instructors. 

It  is,  to  some  extent,  u})on  the  historic  basis  of  such  connections 
as  these  that  the  Johns  Hopkins  University  is  gradually  widening 
its  lines  of  i)ractical  influence  and  efficient  cooperation.  Such 
connections  alford  a  vantage-ground  for  the  up-building  of  Science, 
for  the  extension  of  new  methods  in  America,  for  the  local  estab- 
lishment of  new  ideas.  The  present  plan  for  the  cooperative  study 
of  Historical  and  Political  Science  is  for  advanced  sttidents, 
whether  teachers  or  pupils,  here  or  elsewhere,  to  investigate  in  a 


48  Cooperation  in  University  Work. 

systematic  way  the  Institutional  or  Economic  History  of  their  own 
section  or  locality.  Young  men,  with  slight  experience  in  scien- 
tific research,  will  see  an  obvious  advantage  in  beginning  work 
upon  familiar  ground  and  upon  limited  areas.  It  is  not  necessary 
to  re-write  the  History  of  the  "  Constitution  "  or  to  grapple  with 
the  giant  of  American  Finance  in  order  to  learn  how  to  deal  with 
historic  and  economic  questions.  History  and  Economy  begin  at 
home.  The  family,  the  hamlet,  or  neighborhood,  the  school  or 
parish,  the  village,  town,  city,  county,  and  state  are  historically 
the  ways  by  which  men  have  approached  national  and  international 
life.  It  was  a  preliminary  study  of  the  geography  of  Frankfort 
on  the  Main  that  led  Carl  Ritter  to  study  the  physical  structure 
of  Europe  and  Asia,  and  thus  to  establish  the  new  science  of 
Comparative  Geography.  He  says,  "  Whoever  has  wandered 
through  the  valleys  and  woods,  and  over  the  hills  and  mountains 
of  his  own  State,  will  be  the  one  capable  of  following  a  Herodotus 
in  his  wanderings  over  the  globe."  And  we  may  say  as  Ritter 
said  of  the  science  of  geography,  the  first  step  in  History  is  to 
know  thoroughly  the  district  where  we  live.  In  America,  Guyot 
has  represented  for  many  years  this  method  of  teaching  geog- 
raphy. Huxley  in  his  Physiography  has  introduced  pupils  to  a 
study  of  Nature  in  its  entirety  by  calling  attention  to  the  physical 
features  of  the  Thames  valley  and  the  wide  range  of  natural 
phenomena  that  may  be  observed  in  any  English  Parish.  Hum- 
boldt long  ago  said  in  his  Cosmos,  "  Every  little  nook  and 
shaded  corner  is  but  a  reflection  of  the  whole  of  Nature."  There 
is  something  very  suggestive  and  very  quickening  in  such  a  phil- 
osophy of  Nature  and  History  as  regards  every  spot  of  the  earth's 
surface,  every  pebble,  every  form  of  organic  life,  from  the  lowest 
mollusk  to  the  highest  phase  of  human  society,  as  a  perfect  micro- 
cosm, perhaps  an  undiscovered  world  of  suggestive  truth.  But  it 
is  important  to  remember  that  all  these  things  should  be  studied 
in  their  widest  relations.  Natural  history  is  of  no  significance  if 
viewed  apart  from  Man.  Human  history  is  without  foundation 
if  separated  from  Nature.  The  deeds  of  men,  the  genealogy  of 
families,  the  annals  of  quiet  neighborhoods,  the  records  of  towns. 
Slates  and  nations  are  per  se  of  little  consequence  to  history  unless, 
in  some  way,  these  isolated  things  are  brought  into  vital  connec- 
tion with  the  progress  and  science  of  the  world.     To  establish 


Cooperation  in  University  Worh.  49 

such  connections  is  sometimes  like  the  discovery  of  unknown 
lands,  the  exploration  of  new  countries,  and  the  widening  of  the 
world's  horizoiK 

American  local  history  should  first  be  studied  as  a  contribution 
to  national  history.  This  country  will  yet  be  viewed  and  reviewed 
as  an  organism  of  historic  growth,  (U'velof)iiig  from  minute  germs, 
from  the  very  protoplasm  of  state-life.  And  some  day  this  country 
will  be  studied  in  its  international  relations,  as  an  organic  part  of 
a  larger  organism  now  vaguely  called  the  World  State,  but  as 
surely  developing  through  llie  operation  of  economic,  legal,  social, 
and  scientitic  forces  as  the  American  Union,  the  German  and 
British  E]mpires  are  evolving  into  higher  forms.  But  American 
llistorv  in  its  widest  relations  is  not  to  be  written  by  any  one  man 
or  by  any  one  generation  of  men.  Our  History  will  grow  with  the 
Nation  and  with  its  developing  consciousness  of  internationality. 
The  present  possibilities  for  the  real  progress  of  historic  and  eco- 
nomic science  lie,  first  and  foremost,  in  the  development  of  a  gen- 
eration of  economists  and  practical  historians,  wlio  realize  that 
History  is  past  Politics  and  Politics  present  History;  secondly, 
in  the  expansion  of  the  local  consciousness  into  a  fuller  sense  of 
its  historic  worth  and  dignity,  of  the  cosmopolitan  relations  of 
modern  local  life,  and  of  its  own  wholesome  conservative  power 
in  these  days  of  growing  centralization.  National  and  interna- 
tional life  can  best  develop  upon  the  constitutional  basis  of  Local 
Self  Government  in  Cliurch  and  State. 

The  work  of  developing  a  generation  of  specialists  has  already 
begun  in  the  College  and  the  University.  The  evolution  of  local 
consciousness  can  perhaps  be  best  effected  through  the  Common 
School.  It  is  a  suggestive  local  fact  that  the  School  Committee 
of  Great  Barrington,  Massachusetts,  lately  voted  {Berkshire 
Courier,  September  6,  1S82)  to  introduce  into  their  village  High 
School,*  in  the  hands  of  an  Amherst  graduate,  in  connection  with 
Nordhoflf's  "  Politics  for  Young  Americans"  and  Jevons'  "Primer 
of  Political  Economy,"  the  article  upon  "The  Germanic  Origin 
of  New  England  Towns,"    which  was  once  read  in  part  before 

*The  catalogue  of  the  Great  Barrington  High  School  (1882)  shows  that 
the  study  of  History  and  Politics  is  there  founded,  as  it  should  be,  upon 
a  geographical  basis. 


50  Cooperation  in  University  Work. 

the  Tillage  Improvement  Society  of  Stockbridge,  Massachusetts, 
August  24,  1881,  and  published  in  the  Pittsfield  Evening  Jour- 
nal of  that  day.  Local  demand  really  occasioned  a  University 
supply  of  the  article  in  question.  The  possible  connection  between 
the  College  and  the  Common  School  is  still  better  illustrated  by 
the  case  of  Professor  Macy,  of  Iowa  College,  Grinnell,  who  is  one 
of  the  most  active  pioneers  in  teaching  "the  real,  homely  facts  of 
government,"  and  who  in  1881  published  a  little  tract  on  Civil 
Government  in  Iowa,  which  is  now  used  by  teachers  throughout 
tliat  entire  State  in  preparing  their  oral  instructions  for  young 
pupils,  beginning  with  the  township  and  the  county,  the  institu- 
tions that  are  "nearest  and  most  easily  learned."  A  special 
pupil  of  Professor  Macy's,  Albert  Shaw,  A.  B.,  Iowa  College, 
1879,  is  now  writing  a  similar  treatise  on  Civil  Government  in 
Illinois  for  school  use  in  that  State.  There  should  be  such  a 
manual  for  every  State  in  the  Union. 

It  is  curious  to  see  how  influences  act  and  interact.  In  1881, 
Mr.  Shaw  came  to  the  Johns  Hopkins  University,  leaving  the 
conduct  of  a  Grinnell  newspaper  in  the  hands  of  an  associate 
editor.  Here  in  Baltimore,  the  young  man  from  Iowa  joined  the 
Historical  Seminary  and  wrote  a  paper  upon  "Local  Government 
in  Illinois,"  which  won  high  praise  from  James  Bryce,  M.  P.,  and 
was,  at  the  latter's  request,  published  in  the  Fortnightly  Review, 
October,  1882,  and  will  soon  be  republished  in  this  University 
Series.  From  such  influences  and  such  connections,  local  and 
metropolitan,  Mr.  Shaw  is  now  advancing  to  a  study  of  the  City 
Government  of  Chicago,  in  connection  with  other  workers  in  the 
municipal  field,  which  at  present  perhaps  is  the  most  important  in 
American  Politics. 

Studies  in  Historical  and  Political  Science  in  connection  with 
the  Johns  Hopkins  University  will  advance  upon  municipal  lines 
towards  the  scientific  investigation  of  State  and  National  Insti- 
tutions, political,  ecotiomic,  and  educational.  By  combination  of 
strength  and  by  continual  reinforcement,  American  History  and 
American  Economics  may  finally  advance  in  lines  both  long  and 
firm,  as  seen,  for  exam|)le,  in  the  "Narrative  and  Critical  His- 
tory of  the  United  States,"  which  is  the  joint  work  of  specialists 
in  various  parts  of  the  country.  Extensive  tracts  of  historic  and 
economic   ground    have    been    already   preempted,    but    enough 


Cooperation  in  University  Work.  51 

remains  for  student  ininii^ration  tlirou^hout  the  cominpr  f^enera- 
tion.  The  beauty  of  Science  is  that  there  are  always  New  Worlds 
to  discover.  And  at  the  present  moment,  tliere  await  the  student 
pioneer  vast  tracts  of  American  Institutional  and  Economic  His- 
tory almost  as  unbroken  as  were  once  the  forests  of  America,  her 
coal  measures  and  prairies,  her  mines  of  iron,  silver  and  gold. 
Individual  and  local  elfort  will  almost  everywhere  meet  with  quick 
recognition  and  grateful  returns.  But  scientific  and  cosmopolitan 
relations  with  College  and  University  centres,  together  with  the 
generous  cooperation  of  all  explorers  in  the  same  field,  will  cer- 
tainly yield  the  most  satisfactory  results  both  to  the  individual 
and  to  the  community  which  he  represents. 

It  is  highly  important  that  isolated  students  should  avail  them- 
selves of  the  existing  machinery  of  local  libraries,  the  local  press, 
local  societies,  and  local  clubs.  If  such  things  do  not  exist,  the 
most  needful  should  be  created.  No  community  is  too  small  for 
a  Book  Club  and  for  an  Association  of  some  sort.  Local  stnidies 
should  alvvays  be  connected  in  some  way  with  the  life  of  the 
community  and  should  always  be  used  to  quicken  that  life  to 
higher  conciousness.  A  student,  a  teacher,  who  prepares  a  paper 
on  local  history  or  some  social  question,  should  read  it  before  the 
Tillage  Lyceum  or  some  literary  club  or  an  association  of  teachers. 
If  encouraged  to  believe  his  work  of  any  general  interest  or  per- 
manent value,  he  should  print  it  in  the  local  paper  or  in  a  local 
magazine,  perhaps  an  educational  journal,  without  aspiring  to  the 
highest  i)0|)ular  monthlies,  which  will  certainly  reject  all  purely 
local  contributions  by  unknown  contributors.  It  is  far  more 
practicable  to  publish  by  local  aid  in  pamphlet  form  or  in  the 
proceedings  of  Associations  and  learned  Societies,  before  which 
such  papers  may  sometimes  be  read. 

It  is  highly  desirable  that  every  paper  which  appears  in  con- 
nection with  the  Johns  Hopkins  University  Stuilies  should  bear 
the  stamp  of  corporate  recognition  by  some  worthy  local  organi- 
zation. Such  approval  and  especially  such  preliminary  publica- 
tion, will  introduce  an  unknown  student  to  science  with  credentials 
from  a  local  constituency.  Every  paper  which  is  to  be  printed  in 
this  University  Series  has  some  such  endorsement.  In  cases  where 
it  is  impracticable  to  secure  preliminary  publication  or  local  recog- 
nition, papers  may  be  submitted  to  the  Editor  of  this  Series  for 


52  Cooperation  in  Universiiy  Work. 

reference  to  a  special  committee  and  for  nltimate  report  to  the 
Johns  Hopkins  Historical  and  Political  Science  Association, 
which,  with  its  tributary  Seminaries  of  American  Institntional 
and  Economic  History  is  at  present  the  main  and  not  inadequate 
supi)ly  for  this  University  publication  upon  the  present  basis. 

This  experiment  of  a  University  Series  in  the  field  of  Historical 
and  Political  Science,  like  many  other  experiments  in  connection 
with  the  educational  policy  of  the  Johns  Hopkins,  is  "tentative." 
It  is  jtrimarily  an  attempt  to  meet  a  felt  want  on  the  part  of  grad- 
uate students  of  History  and  Politics  at  this  institution.  It  is 
secondarily  a  means  of  efficient  cooperation  between  graduates 
liere  and  friends  of  Historical  and  Political  Science  elsewhere, 
along  lines  of  inquiry  that  have  been  already  opened  in  American 
Institutional  and  Economic  History.  The  plan  is  upon  a  very 
safe  footing  and  will  not  outrun  the  range  of  actual  experience. 
Every  step  thus  far  has  been  experimental.  Every  paper  upon 
the  published  list  has  relations  establislied  with  some  local  clientage, 
some  learned  society,  magazine,  or  journal,  or  else  with  the  Johns 
Hopkins  University.  The  foundations  of  the  enterprise  are  thus 
historical  and  economic. 

Encouragement  has  been  given  to  the  undertaking  by  the  Presi- 
dent and  Trustees  of  the  Johns  Hopkins  University,  by  the  His- 
torical Societies  of  Maryland,  Pennsylvania,  South  Carolina;  by 
the  New  England  Historical  and  Genealogical  Society,  by  the 
Essex  Institute,  the  Magazine  of  American  History,  by  the  Penn- 
sylvania Magazine  of  History  and  Biography,  by  the  American 
Antiquarian  Society,  the  American  Social  Science  Association, 
and  by  the  Fortnightly  Review.  Aside  from  such  corporate 
recognition,  three  eminent  specialists  in  the  field  of  History  and 
Politics  have  expressed  their  hearty  approval  of  this  project:  Mr. 
Edward  A.  Freeman,  who  stands  as  godfather  to  the  series  by  a 
contribution  to  its  first  number;  James  Bryce,  M.  P.,  who  re- 
quested one  of  the  Studies  for  publication  in  an  English  Review  ; 
Maxinie  Kovalevsky,  Professor  of  History  and  Politics  in  the 
University  of  Moscow,  who  last  summer  came  to  this  country  to 
investigate  our  agrarian  history  and  the  germ-life  of  American 
Institutions,  which  subjects  he  found  already  in  process  of  inves- 
tigation at  the  Johns  Hopkins  Universiiy. 

The  international  comity  of  Science  is  well  illustrated  in  the 
visit  of  this  Russian  Professor,  the  friend  of  Turgenieff,  who  intro- 


Cooperation  in  University  Work.  53 

dnoed  him  to  tliis  country  tlirongh  Henry  Holt,  of  New  York. 
After  visiting  Harvard  University,  Professor  Kovalevsky  came  to 
Baltimore  with  letters  of  introduction  to  members  of  tlie  Johns 
Hopkins,  with  some  of  whom  he  liad  already  indirect  acqunintance 
througli  tlie  cosmopolitan  associations  of  German  Universities. 
On  his  way  to  lialtimore  he  visited  the  library  of  the  Pennsylvania 
Historical  Society  in  Pliiladelpliia  and  asked  Mr.  Stone,  the  libra- 
rian and  editor  of  tlie  Penn.sylvania  Magazine  of  History  and 
Biography,  if  he  liad  any  materials  upon  the  subject  of  Local  Self 
Government  in  that  State.  "Nothing  except  proof-sheets,"  was 
the  resjjonse,  and  Mr.  Stone  handed  Professor  Kovalevsky  an 
article  which  Mr.  E.  R.  L.  Gould  had  lately  read  before  the 
Pennsylvania  Historical  Society  and  wliich  was  about  to  be  printed 
in  the  Magazine.  The  Professor  continued  his  journey  to  Balti- 
more and  sought  out  Mr.  Gould,  as  well  as  the  scientific  resources 
of  the  Seminary,  which,  together  with  those  of  the  Maryland 
Historical  Society,  were  placed  entirely  at  his  command.  He 
gathered  much  in  a  few  days,  chiefly  documents,  touching  the 
history  of  onr  Public  Lands  and  the  mode  of  settling  and  organ- 
izing the  Great  West.  He  requested  the  cooperation  of  the 
Seminary  in  making  known  to  Russia  the  Listitutional  and  Eco- 
nomic History  of  the  United  States.  He  made  arrangements  for 
the  sending  to  Moscow  of  all  monograi)hs  in  tin's  Series  as  soon  as 
published,  and  even  secured  proof  sheets  of  Mr.  Gould's  article 
and  other  University  papers  in  their  first  form  of  publication. 
But  he  gave  the  Seminary  far  more  than  he  received.  He  held 
long  conferences  with  individual  members  ;  he  put  them  upon 
the  track  of  old  world  monographs  that  had  escaped  American 
notice;  he  put  individuals  in  communication  with  European 
scholars;  he  gave  many  useful  suggestions  as  to  the  best  methods 
of  exploiting  Old  English  Institutional  and  Economic  History, 
upon  which  subjects  he  himself  has  worked  for  many  years. 

Professor  Kovalevsky  is  the  leading  Russian  authority  in  the 
field  of  economic  and  institutional  history,  wherein  there  have 
been  and  are  so  many  co-workers  in  various  countries,  among 
whom  are  George  and  Konrad  Von  Maurer,  Hanssen,  Meitzen, 
Thun,  Nasse,  Knies,  Roscher,  Biicher,  Held,  InaraaSternegg, 
Brentano,  Cohn,  Ochenkowski,  Miaskowsky,  Laveleye,  Fustel  de 
Coulanges,  Rogers,  Sir  Henry  Maine,  Mr.  Secbohm,  Henry  Adams, 


54  Cooperation  in  University  Wo7'k. 

H.  C.  Lodge,  Ernest  Young,  J.  Laurence  Laughlin,  W.  F.  Allen, 
and  D.  W.  Ross.  In  the  Revue  Historique,  the  French  rival  of 
the  Uisioriache  Zeittichrift,  is  an  appreciative  Review,  May  and 
June,  1882,  of  Kovalevsky's  labors  in  the  history  of  communal 
institutions.  In  speal<ing  of  his  two  most  recent  works,  written 
in  Russian,  one  on  Communal  Property  (I.  Moscow,  1879)  afid 
the  other  on  the  Social  Organization  of  England  at  the  close  of 
the  ^liiUlle  Ages  (Moscow,  1880),  it  is  said,  "  Ce  sont  les  ouvrages 
les  plus  importaiits  et  les  plus  solides  qui  aient  vu  le  jour  en  Russie 
dans  ces  deu.\  dernieres  annees."  The  first  work,  not  yet  com- 
pleted, concerns  communal  property  among  the  native  races  of 
America,  the  agrarian  policy  of  Spain  in  the  East  Indies,  com- 
munal property  in  India,  modiHcations  of  the  land  tenure  in  India 
by  Mohammedan  and  English  dominion,  land  tenure  in  Algiers 
and  the  agrarian  policy  of  France.  Kovalevsky  has  also  written 
an  Umriss  einer  Geschichte  der  Zerstiickelung  der  Feldgemein- 
schaft  im  Kanton  Waadt  (Ziirich,  1877),  and  various  other  works, 
in  French  and  Russian. 

The  advice  and  encoura«'eraent  of  such  a  cosmopolite  in  Sci- 
ence, who  is  equally  at  home  in  Paris,  London,  Berlin,  and 
Moscow,  who  has  investigated  the  social  and  economic  history  of 
countries  as  wide  apart  as  India  and  America,  who  studies  the 
Landesgemeinde  of  Switzerland,  the  Town  Meeting  of  New 
England,  and  the  Russian  Mir  as  kindred  institutions,  who  views 
the  American  Prairies  of  the  Great  West  and  the  Russian  Steppes 
of  the  Great  East  in  the  same  economic  light,  who  represents  in 
his  political  philosophy  the  wide  horizon  of  internationality  as 
well  as  nation,  state,  and  narrow  commune, — the  advice  and 
encouragement  of  such  a  man  cannot  but  quicken  American 
youtli  who  are  beginners  in  Science.  There  is  no  danger  of  their 
studies  being  lost  or  absorbed  in  such  a  master  mind.  On  the 
contrary,  through  such  influences,  through  such  connections  with 
European  scholars  and  European  journals,  good  local  work  in 
America  will  pass  into  higher  international  forms  and  yet  remain 
distinctively  American. 

European  scholars  are  only  too  glad  to  accept  and  recognize  as 
authoritative  tHe  special  work  of  American  students  investigating 
upon  their  own  ground,  with  all  the  advantages  of  local  acquaint- 
ance, local  observation,  local  libraries,  (private  and  public),  local 


I 


Cooperation  in  University  Work.  55 

societies,  local  syinpiitliy,  and  local  cooperation.  Forei<rii  scholars, 
who  travel  throu^-'h  this  country  in  a  hurried  way,  know  well  that 
their  knowledfre  of  the  land  is  superficial  and  their  experience 
necessarily  limited.  01)servers  of  American  Democracy  like 
Tocqueville,  Kovalevsky,  Freennan,  Bryce,  and  Herbert  Spencer 
may  ascend  the  very  citadel  of  scientific  privilcfre;  they  may  view 
the  country  with  tlieir  own  eyes,  throu^^ii  newspapers,  or  throuj^h 
book?,  but  they  can  never  command  the  American  situation.  Nor 
is  this  their  ambition.  Their  primary  object  is  to  sketch  America 
fur  the  benefit  of  their  own  countrymen  ;  and  they  are  always  glad 
to  carry  home  sug<restive  ideas  for  the  completion  of  their  sketches. 
Professor  Kovalevsky  would  have  been  delighted  to  find  in  Bal- 
timore articles  on  the  Local  Self-Government  of  every  State  in 
the  Union.  Mr.  Bryce  would  have  been  pleased  to  find  some 
scientific  account  of  the  origin  and  course  of  that  municipal  rev- 
olution  in  Philadelphia,  where,  in  classic  speech,  Air.  Freeman 
described  the  overthrow  of  one-man  power  as  procumhit  humi 
bos! 

American  students  are  beginning  to  find  out  the  scientific  sig- 
nificance of  contemporary  Municipal  and  National  Politics  in 
America.  They  are  beginning  to  see  what  wide-reaching  eco- 
nomic, institutional,  administrative,  educational,  political,  and 
international  problems  may  l)e  investigated  at  home  without  going 
abroad  for  original  material.  Old  world  science  and  old  world 
methods  have  been  introduced  into  this  country  in  a  liberal  way 
during  the  past  few  decades,  and  from  this  scientific  vantage- 
o-round  it  would  seem  to  be  most  advisable  for  American  students 
of  History  and  Politics  to  enter  fields  for  which  there  are  in  this 
country  very  superior  advantages.  While  recognizing  the  unity 
of  all  Science,  we  must  nevertheless  admit  that  there  are  limita- 
tions and  varying  conditions  for  the  successful  prosecution  of 
certain  branches.  It  would  obviously  be  very  poor  economy  for 
an  American,  living  in  this  country,  to  attempt  to  write  the  mu- 
nicipal or  economic  history  of  any  English  Town,  German  Free 
City,  or  French  Commune,  for  which  work  the  best,  if  not  the 
only,  materials  are  upon  the  other  side  of  the  Ocean.  On  the 
other  hand,  not  even  DeuUcher  Fleiss,  or  a  German  University, 
or  the  British  Museum,  can  amass  and  control  the  materials, 
manuscript  and  printed,  relating  to  a  single  American  city  or  one 


56  Cooperation  in  University  Work. 

of  the  older  New  England  Towns.  And  yet  such  resources  can 
easily  be  commanded  by  Americans  at  home,  through  the  media- 
tion of  Stale  Historical  Societies,  or  through  connection  with 
American  antiquarians  and  local  historians.  Why  should  Amer- 
icans attempt  to  write  the  history  of  foreign  governments,  foreign 
institutions,  old  world  economies,  when  there  is  so  much  to  do 
upon  home-ground  ?  The  results  of  European  investigations  lie 
before  our  very  doors,  and  can  be  employed  in  a  thousand  legiti- 
mate ways  for  the  upbuilding  of  American  Institutional  and 
Americnn  Economic  History.  Pioneer  work  and  fresh  discoveries 
are  everywhere  possible  in  this  country;  but  this  cannot  be  said 
so  emphatically  of  the  Old  World.  All  the  benefit  of  scientific 
method  and  scholarly  training  that  could  be  derived  from  travers- 
ing and  re-traversing  the  archaeological  fields  of  Europe,  may  be 
enjoyed  in  America,  with  the  additional  advantage  of  finding  new 
truth  in  independent  ways. 

No  country  has  such  scientific  possibilities  as  America,  where 
in  a  College  Town  of  12,000  inhabitants,  like  Northampton,  Mas- 
sachusetts, one  individual,  Judge  Forbes,  leaves  a  bequest  of  over 
two  hundred  thousand  dollars  for  a  free  public  library  "  of  science 
and  the  arts  in  their  broadest  acceptation,  of  ancient  and  modern 
history,  and  of  the  literature  of  our  own  and  other  nations ; "  or 
where,  as  in  the  city  of  Baltimore,  another  individual,  George 
Peabody,  endows  with  $1,250,000  an  institute,  comprising,  (in 
addition  to  lecture  courses,  a  conservatory  of  music,  and  an  art 
gallery),  "an  extensive  library,  to  be  well  furnished  in  every 
department,  to  satisfy  the  researches  of  students  who  may  be  en- 
gaged in  the  pursuit  of  knowledge  not  ordinarily  attainable  in  the 
private  libraries  of  the  country;"  and  where  another  individual, 
Enoch  Pratt,  endows  another  public  library  with  over  a  million 
dollars;  and  where  still  another  philanthropist  endows  a  Univer- 
sity and  a  Hospital  upon  a  scientific  basis  with  a  total  fund  of 
17,000,000.  And  if  such  generous  foundations  are  not  enough  to 
gratify  the  growing  wants  of  young  Americans,  there  is  the 
e.xpanding  Library  of  Congress,  the  Library  of  the  State  Depart- 
ment, with  its  manuscript  treasures,  the  Smithsonian  Institute, 
and  the  scientific  resources  of  the  National  Government,  which, 
through  pro|)er  channels,  may  be  commanded  by  the  poorest 
student. 


Cooperation  in  University  Worh.  57 

And  yet  even  these  prospects,  my  hearers,  are  not  tlie  widest 
which  are  openinfj:  to  view.  Through  University  cooperation  in 
Baltimore,  the  individual  scholar  may  now  command  the  latest 
results  of  scientific  incjuiry,  even  before  it  takes  permanent  form 
in  printed  volumes  and  in  the  great  libraries  of  Town,  City,  and 
Nation.  Through  our  University  Journals,  the  teacher  of  science, 
and  the  special  student,  even  though  removed  from  scientific  cen- 
tres, may  learn  of  the  progress  of  his  department  in  this  country 
and  in  Europe.  Through  a  system  of  scientific  exchanges,  now 
developing  in  Baltimore,  the  Proceedings  of  learned  societies,  the 
most  recent  discoveries  in  foreign  laboratories  of  science  are 
quickly  made  known  to  American  students.  Through  a  New 
Book  Department,  the  freshest  monographs  and  the  newest  books, 
French,  German,  and  English,  are  brought  to  student-notice 
immediately  upon  publication,  so  that  Americans  in  Baltimore 
are  more  sure  of  seeing  these  things  than  is  possible  in  the  smaller 
German  University  towns,  where  such  library  organization  is 
unknown. 

By  organized,  cooperative  effort,  American  students  can  estab- 
lish organic  relations  with  European  Universities,  Old  World 
Societies,  foreign  magazines  of  a  special  character,  scientific  appli- 
ances for  publication,  both  in  this  country  and  in  Europe, — in 
fact  with  the  whole  complex  of  Modern  Science,  into  which  no 
individual  student  can  possibly  find  his  way  without  scientific 
associations.  Fellowship  in  Science  will  always  afford  the  indi- 
vidual greater  strength  than  he  can  acquire  alone.  A  connection 
with  learned  societies,  special  libraries,  special  journals,  is  higldy 
advantageous.  Cooperation  in  University  work  and  the  organi- 
zation of  scientific  results  are  very  important  for  American 
students,  who  wish  to  advance  the  cause  of  special  education  in 
this  country,  and  thereby  the  cause  of  American  Science. 


LIBRARY 

UNIVERSITY  OF  CATJT^ORNT^ 

SANTA  BARBARA 


THE  LIBRARY 
IMVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA 

Santa  Barbara 
Goleta,  California 


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